KANAHENA: A Cherokee Story

St. Martin's Press, 1988. 1st Edition Assumed 1st Printing. Hardcover. As New/New. Susan L. Roth color collages. CONDITION: UNREAD, but not quite perfect, 1988 St. Martin's hardcover (white boards) & dust jacket (in mylar cover), first edition, assumed first printing. The Author's colorful collages provide the illustrations. Why is this AS NEW? 2 glue spots back inside cover and just generally not willing to say a 1988 book is truly new on my part. CONTENT: Two stories of turtle as trickster. In Fire. . . , several animals try without success to steal fire from the Moon-god. Tortoise knows that he can do it, but he needs straw to capture fire. So Chameleon steals some for him, tricking the Moon-god's straw-keeper by changing color. This second theft parallels and foreshadows Tortoise's fire-theft, but introducing it has the effect of doubling back on the story line, interrupting the forward movement. It's a crowded story, full of characters and commotion. The trickery appeals. In Roth's cut-paper collages, arrangements of brightly colored shapes against a black ground make a decorative page. In Kanahena, Terrapin tricks a wolf pack that wants to destroy him for disrespectful behavior to one of their own. Using a familiar motif, he begs them not to do the one thing that he knows will save him - throw him into the water. But there's a lot more than that going on here, from the device of an old-woman narrator, to Terrapin's food-sharing visits to friends, to how Terrapin got the marks on his shell, to a recipe for making Kanahena (a cornmeal dish). K- grade 2.