Arrow to the Sun

Gerald McDermott adapts a Pueblo creation story, drawn from Acoma Pueblo tradition, about a boy born when the Lord of the Sun sends a spark of life down into a pueblo below. Growing up without a father and mocked by the other children for it, the boy sets out to find where he came from, and an old arrowsmith, moved by his determination, transforms him into an arrow and shoots him straight up into the sky to reach the Sun's own house. Once there, the Sun Lord will not simply accept that the boy is his son; he sends him through four trial kivas instead, chambers filled first with lions, then serpents, then bees, then finally a chamber of pure lightning, and the boy survives all four, proving his own claim through what he endures rather than through anything he says. Accepted at last as the Sun's true child, the boy returns to earth carrying the Sun's own power inside him, and his people celebrate his homecoming with a Dance of Life, a scene McDermott invented himself rather than drew from any single source, to give the story a communal ending rather than ending on the boy alone.

McDermott, who had already made animated short films of folktales from Africa, Japan and elsewhere before turning to picture books, illustrates the story in flat, brilliantly saturated gouache and ink, geometric suns, mesas and kiva chambers rendered almost like stained glass. It suits children around five to nine, and its four repeated trials, each harder and stranger than the last, give the story a clear rising structure even for a listener unfamiliar with Pueblo tradition going in.