21 May Fowler Families: How Night Came from the Sea: A Story from Brazil


Mary-Joan Gerson retells a Brazilian story of how night was brought to earth from the sea. Before the arrival of darkness, there was “only sunlight and brightness and heat.” When a daughter of African goddess Iemanja leaves her ocean home to marry “a son of the earth people,” she sorely misses the cool cover of darkness. Only a bag of night from her mother’s kingdom can restore her happiness. Soon the earth people, too, come to know the beauty of night. Carla Golembe’s exuberant compositions gracefully reflect the story’s movement from lightness to the coming of night.

How Night Came from the Sea: A Story from Brazil
By Mary-Joan Gerson
llustrated by Carla Golembe
Little Brown & Co., 1994

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