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The Encyclopedia Of Early Earth (2013)

by Isabel Greenberg(Favorite Author)

4.12 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0385678150 (ISBN13: 9780385678155)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Bond Street Books

review 1: Greenberg has invented a cute mythology in comic form where a storytelling eskimo boy searches for a piece of his soul. Giants, bird-headed gods, vikings, and meddling mapmakers get in the way. The myths and legends all have tints and shades of stories you know (a Noah even survives a flood) but Greenberg twists them to make the stories her own in a Scheherazade-like fashion where fables sit inside legends nestled between myths.
review 2: Wow. I was not sure what I was expecting -- cultural appropriation, pretentiousness and self-important seriousness -- but I was wrong. Isabel Greenberg reimagines a meeting of old cultures in their youth, notably Inuit and Norse/viking peoples, and tells stories that are unique, individual, and not coopting anyone's mythology ... morebut finding inspiration and elements that get pieced together in a collage of stories and mythologies. The characters are not at all stereotypical, timeless yet somehow modern, and full of depth. There is more to the book than a comparison and contrast of cultures, though. The book is also a story of love and of family, of survival, of finding strength and self. I can't remember being this wholly engaged and uncritically enchanted by a book like this. The illustrations, playing secondary to the magical storytelling, are beautiful, deceptively simple, full of black and white lines and shadows accentuated by well-placed vivid colors. This was a magical, lovely, deep, layered, playful, thoughtful, humorous, reflective phenomenal book that is somehow reverently agnostic and irreverently spiritual at the same time. Read this. Add it to your library. It belongs on the same shelves as holy books. less

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