IMANI’S MUSIC

In this riveting original tale, Imani, an African grasshopper, first persuades the Ancestors to give the ability to make music to everything on earth, then carries his own special songs on a slave ship to the New World. Writing in a poetic, powerfully expressive idiom—“He danced on the path ’tween the ‘Used-to-Be,’ the ‘Here-and-Now,’ and the ‘What’s-Gon’-Come.’ Shoot, it was folks like him that fed the path and kept it alive”—Williams (And in the Beginning, 1992, etc.) captures not only a sharp sense of the joy Imani takes in creating music, but the strength of spirit required to keep at it on the long Middle Passage. “He learned new songs. He sang them bittersweet, but he sang on!” And after the voyage, when he went on to teach his music to those who also came over, they too sang on. A modern, young narrator tells the tale as one heard from her grandfather; using sinuous, stylized figures in both symbolic and literal ways, Daly (The Star-Bearer, p. 110, etc.) takes viewers in stages from the narrator’s time, to the distant past and back. She ends on a moonlit country road, down which walk Grandfather and his young audience, listening to the music of Imani’s many descendants. A rare, resplendent combination of history, folklore, strong imagery, and evocative storytelling. (Picture book. 7-10)