Gr 5 Up—The Aztecs called the land from the Andes all the way up to Alaska the Sea-Ringed World. In this vibrant,
accessible work, Garcia Esperón conveys in lush language the sacred tales that uncover the heart of these two
continents. Mijangos's striking art, rendered in a limited palette, will mesmerize.

I loved reading these stories. Almost all of them were new to me, not just in the ways the stories unfolded, but in the cosmologies they represent. But I wish the book had been organized differently.

The stories are shuffled together, irrespective of origin, so it's difficult to get a sense for what the Nahua or the Taino or the Andean peoples believe. Instead, the details of each pantheon of gods or heroic figures or creation tales all blend together. And if I hoped to pick up some of the pronunciation for each people's sacred figures? That proved time-consuming and frustrating as the book bounced from one language to another.

Along the same lines, while there's a thorough pronunciation guide in the backmatter, none of the cultures are given pronunciations. And while the glossary does an excellent job of defining and instructing on pronunciation for the gods, heroes, and monsters in the stories, it doesn't bother defining anything else, even when those unknown words aren't given much context in the stories, themselves.

There are also several cultures which receive very little attention in the book—mostly those in North America—and when I checked the bibliography, there weren't many sources listed that might allow me to explore those cultures further. A Recommended Reading section would've been really helpful, especially if those books had been vetted by the experts listed in the "special thanks."

I'm glad books like this are getting published more and more regularly, but they're still pretty thin on the ground, and this one was not as satisfying or enlightening as I hoped it would be. My mind feels stuffed with new stories, but I don't really have a sense of who those stories represent or how those people might have seen, or still see, the world. ( )

4/5