550 Earth Sciences
Dewey, Jennifer Owings. Mud Matters: Stories from a Mud Lover. (Illus.; photographs by Stephen Trimble.) Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 1998. 72pp. $14.95. 97-32829. ISBN 0-7614-5014-9. Glossary; Index; C.I.P.
EA-YA, C, T, GA ++
Mud is lively . . . and so is this book. Jennifer Dewey writes in a highly personal style, right from the fun of the pun in the title to it's the glossary. The book is brilliant. Mud is stuff that smells good . . . usually. Mud squeezes up between your toes. Mud is for daubing, for Indian rituals, and for slinging. Mud is for toy villages and for big adobe buildings. Mud is the primordial ooze from which life emerged. Mud stands thousands of feet in canyon walls, transformed by geological processes. A flash flood can change hard clay into a gooey mass and mud into quicksand. When caught between her need to know and a fear of being swallowed up in the sliding rivers, the 11-year-old protagonist (Dewey herself) gets in quicksand up to her neck. The rewards of risk, she finds, are knowledge and confidence. The drawings of ravens, wasps, and animals are her own. Color photos—e.g., of dark hands working a whitish mud into a pot and of children at the edge of Grand Canyon playing in a mud hole—complement the drawings. Mud does matter, although it is not much in the experience of high-rise kids. With imagination, you can transform mud into...well...whatever you want.—Will Kyselka, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI
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