The Book of Nature Myths

These aren't your Disney-fied fairy tales. This is older stuff, stranger stuff - myths pulled from cultures around the world that once explained the thunder, the seasons, the colors of birds, why the snake has no legs. Florence Holbrook gathered these stories in an age when people still remembered that myths weren't just for children - they were how humans made sense of a bewildering world. The stories here are origin tales at their purest: how fire came to the first people, why the bear sleeps through winter, what makes the hummingbird's wings hum. Each one offers a different answer to the same ancient question: why is the world the way it is? They're brief, strange, sometimes funny, sometimes dark. The hummingbird story alone - about a flame that escaped and became a bird - contains more genuine wonder than most contemporary children's books manage in three hundred pages. For the child who asks 'but why?' about everything. For the reader who wants to remember what it felt like when the world was still magic.