Night of the White Deer

K-Gr 2—This self-described modern folktale creates a mythology around the aurora borealis. A farm boy hears stories of a mysterious white deer with unknown origins that some believe to be a star. His father is cagey when the subject comes up, and his older brother teases him for believing the stories. One night, the deer appears and the boy follows her on a journey into the sky, which blazes with colors that turn out to be gazelles, elk, antelope, and deer "dancing the dance of the aurora." The boy travels through space until the white deer brings him back home. When he relates his adventure to his family, his brother again mocks him, but his father tells him that when he was a child, he had also journeyed with the white deer. The father asks if they can travel together if the white deer returns, and the boy, feeling a new connection with him, agrees. There are some beautiful moments in the text, but the overall flow of the story is choppy. Likewise, some of the illustrations are remarkable, while others seem cramped and fail to capture the grandeur and scale of the boy's journey in space. Solidly grounded in a rural farming community, the book has a strong sense of place; unfortunately neither illustrations nor text gel into more than the sum of their parts.—Anna Haase Krueger, Ramsey County Library, White Bear Lake, MN