This book's joyful celebration of Earth's gifts to us — and ours in return — would be enough to make us recommend it. But the coupling of this celebration with a tragedy sets the book apart, as the duo at the book's heart have to face their grief, set aside the question "Why?", and ask themselves instead how they can creatively respond to a terrible loss.
In an old stone barn, Meadow and her Grandpa create clay instruments: flutes, whistles, ocarinas, horns, and round pot drums. Grandpa tells Meadow that clay comes from the body of our Earth and can be shaped to make "creek song, cricket song, wind song, wolf song." Grandpa's own grandpa gave him a hawk-shaped clay ocarina "that sang up this Earth" — drawing curious wild animals close, singing their own songs in response.
When lightning strikes and sets their barn on fire, leaving only shards from their instruments, much of their world is literally shattered. It's then that they need to discover how to make this tragedy an opportunity for something new to emerge.
Illustrator Mercè Tous sensitively brings readers ages four to eight into the beauties of natural and human creation. At the end, when we see Grandpa and Meadow out among the sun-tipped mountains, a hawk soaring above them, our hearts soar, too.
In addition to crafting a moving story, author Cheryl Hellner writes an author's note that begins by quoting Thomas Merton: "Oh Earth! O Earth! When will we hear you sing?" She gives credit to ancient indigenous people all over the world for shaping clay into musical instruments with "a nearly infinite range of possibilities for shape, sound and tone, and elaborate decoration." She hopes that the book will nourish children's sense of wonder and "call forth the gifts their creativity, and ours, can bring to the whole sacred community of life."
