Eric A. Kimmel (retelling)
Yongsheng Xuan (illustrator)
Ten Suns: A Chinese Legend
Holiday House, 1998
Indeed, the story of Hou Yi, the archer who shot down nine of ten suns to save the earth from being scorched, is, well, legendary in Chinese culture. And so, retelling such a story has its challenges. Eric A. Kimmel begins with a fantastic and compelling image of a wondrous palace atop a giant mulberry tree. But I found the following pages less interesting. The suns' personification as sons made it difficult to accept their being shot by arrows. And, it was little comfort that the shots didn't kill but merely transformed them into crows. Yongsheng Xuan's illustrations are an odd mixture of Soviet-influenced socialist realism (the image of the bare-chested Hu Yi is so hard-edged as to warrant literally the descriptive term "cut") and a Chinese vernacular taste for technicolor. His style gave Ten Suns for me a kind of artificiality. Further, without an image of a real person suffering from the ten-sun drought, I found the narrative's dramatic urgency false.
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