Star Stuff

K-Gr 3–In this original tale, young readers will be swept up to the very stars to walk beside an unlikely pairing, a sky caretaker named Giovanni and his faithful donkey, Lorenzo, as they plant “star stuff” and face the danger of a nebula with the aid of three constellations who come to life in the duo’s time of need. With his signature harmony of dark and light strokes of color to organically shape figures’ outlines and bloom across the page in beautifully enticing layers, Raschka’s brilliant watercolors swell with a dreamlike quality to match and elevate the tone of the story’s folktale-like design. Warm golds radiate starshine and the vastness of the nebula; a muted red trims Lorenzo’s bridle and Giovanni’s clothes, while darker, cooler blues and greys fill the night sky and the imposing bodies of the heroic, larger-than-life constellations. The story is told in short phrases, positioned like poem stanzas, that rely heavily on the clarity of its rhymes and expressive, descriptive verbs, some of which seem overused when depicting the clumsy Lorenzo. As the rising action builds and phrases repeat to formulate a familiar pattern for readers, the longer stanzas sometimes splinter in rhythm as more lines are added and the complexity of the rhyming structure may unsettle newly independent readers. The appearance of the constellations may strike readers as sudden, yet timely, as will the draining nature of the nebula, so young readers who are familiar with Zodiac signs and names and other stories related to the stars may find the characters’ tenacity more believable and the resolution more gratifying.