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Come On, Rain!

Amazon.com Price:  $11.30 (as of 05/05/2019 07:46 PST- Details)

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Description

“Come on, rain!” Tess pleads to the sky as listless vines and parched plants droop in the endless heat. Up and down the block, cats pant at the same time as heat wavers off tar patches in the broiling alleyway. More than anything, Tess hopes for rain. And when it comes, she and her friends are able for a surprising joyous celebration….

Through exquisite language and acute remark, Newbery medalist Karen Hesse recreates the glorious experience of a quenching rainstorm on a sweltering summer day. Jon J Muth’s masterful and lyrical watercolors perfectly reflect the spirit of the text.

On this quietly affecting story, award-winning writer Karen Hesse and artist Jon J. Muth deftly capture the magnificence of a sudden rainstorm on a swelteringly hot day. A lot more than a simple tale of weather, Come On, Rain! also portrays the tenderness of mother-daughter relations, the rhythms of urban society, and the power of nature to become and reinvigorate all forms of life.

The book’s collaborators, more like alchemists, work wonders. Muth’s sunbaked watercolors perfectly convey the washed-out, drought-stricken world, at the same time as Hesse’s gripping narrative–a detailed prose poem written in the voice of the watchful, pigtailed Tessie–conveys undaunted hope and anticipation. Like a long-limbed little bird–all twiggy legs and arms–Tessie moves through the neighborhood, observing her Mamma, her friends, the skies, even the streets:

Up and down the block,
cats pant,
heat wavers off tar patches in the broiling alleyway….

I stare out over rooftops,
past chimneys, into the way off distance.
And that is the reason when I see it coming,
clouds rolling in,
gray clouds, bunched and bulging under a purple sky.

A creeper of hope circles round my bones.
“Come on, rain!” I whisper.

As the downpour approaches, Tessie gathers her neighborhood friends for a romp in the raindrops. Their eager anticipation is matched by a rain shower so gigantic, it even makes their mothers run into the street. It is literally the stuff that dreams are made of–my own daughter dreamed of the delicious downpour the night we first read the book. (Click to see a sample spread. Text ©1999 by Karen Hesse. Illustrations ©1999 by Jon J. Muth. Reproduced with permission of Scholastic, Inc.) (Ages 5 and older) –Jean Lenihan

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