Eighteen tragicomic short stories that explore love, tragedy, and loss. As he disassembles an infant’s nursery, a father struggles for ways to tell his young daughter her brother is dead; a boy learns the truth about his parents’ divorce; an out of work rock musician finds himself custodian of an abandoned child; a wife who sets out to find her husband’s secret lover discovers a secret she’s kept from herself; while settling their estranged father’s estate, adult sisters encounter a side of their parents they never knew; a ne’er-do-well uncle pays the price for putting his young nephew’s life at risk; a widow discovers that her need for love lives beyond the man she loved; a fifteen-year-old boy seeks to know his older brother who is away at war. Although the characters often lack the navigational tools for finding and sustaining meaningful love, they all courageously follow the path illuminated by whatever light is available to them.
The Bungling Host motif appears in countless indigenous cultures in North America and beyond. In this groundbreaking work Daniel Clément has gathered nearly four hundred North American variants of the story to examine how myths acquire meaning for their indigenous users and explores how seemingly absurd narratives can prove to be a rich source of meaning when understood within the appropriate context. In analyzing the Bungling Host tales, Clément considers not only material culture but also social, economic, and cultural life; Native knowledge of the environment; and the world of plants and animals. Clément’s analysis uncovers four operational modes in myth construction and clarifies the relationship between mythology and science. Ultimately he demonstrates how science may have developed out of an operational mode that already existed in the mythological mind.
When Nicki drops his white mitten in the snow, he goes on without realizing that it is missing. One by one, woodland animals find it and crawl in; first, a curious mole, then a rabbit, a badger and others, each one larger than the last. Finally, a big brown bear is followed in by a tiny brown mouse and what happens next makes for a wonderfully funny climax. As the story of the animals in the mitten unfolds, the reader can see Nicki in the boarders of each page, walking through the woods unaware of what is going on. Once again Jan Brett has created a dramatic and beautiful picture book in her distinctive style. She brings the animals to life with warmth and humor, and her illustrations are full of visual delights and details faithful to the Ukrainian tradition from which the story comes.