Storybook Favorites
Dear Sun, Sincerely Moon
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| Graffiti Sun Moon - Source |
This storybook deals with the idea that the sun and the moon constantly receive and sent out letters that are sorted by the interstellar mail room. The issue, however, is that the sun and the moon have been given thousands of different names throughout time, thus making the jobs of the interstellar mail workers that much harder. Each of the stories then acts as a letter written between the sun and moon but is based on different mythological from different cultures showing the origin stories of the sun and moon, and how they are related to each other. The introduction was a fun way of introducing the concept of the sun and moon having different names and the fact that the stories were written as letters, but I would have liked to see more of the interstellar mail room. That being said, I loved that the stories were told through letters and that they represented the different origin stories of the sun and moon, including an Aztec myth, a Cherokee legend, and a Filipino folk tale.
Flood Myths
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| Stormy Sea by Mark |
This storybook is probably my favorite out of the three because of how original its design is. The stories are written as a sort of pick-your-own-story game in which you are presented with several options, and depending on what you choose you may get to live or die trying. Each story represents myths surrounding massive flooding of earth, and the reader has to live through the myth as the protagonist of the story. I thought this was an incredibly clever and fun of presenting the myths, especially in the story of Utnapishtim from the Epic of Gilgamesh where your decisions on how to prepare for the flood decided your fate. I managed to survive the flood, saved three other people, and a few animals; I probably could have done better, but at least I stayed alive!
Asking Anubis
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| Horus and Anubis by Daniel Columna |
This last storybook was another very clever one in which the stories are presented as a radio talk show and advice hotline for everything related to the afterlife. In this hotline, clients can ask Anubis the Egyptian God of death for advice and help on every issue concerning the afterlife, but the clients are some of the other gods and mythological characters as well. I also thought it was really interesting that this storybook combined different cultures into one storyline. Whilst the other storybooks also dealt with several cultures, they weren't intertwined but rather neatly separated. In this one, however, Izanagi who is a Japanese God of the Heavens calls Anubis to try to deal with the grief over losing his sister/wife Izanami, Goddess of Love. I thought it was very clever to have the Egyptian God of death try and comfort a God of heaven, it was a very intimate and real conversation about grief.
Overall I noticed that I enjoy the combination of different cultures and myths, as well as clever and original ways of presenting the stories. Reading these storybooks gave me some ideas about what I may want to write and how to present it. I may want to mess around with some indigenous Latin American legends, maybe even some from my home country Venezuela, and perhaps mess around with them to make them more interesting.
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