Illustrated by Grizelda Holderness2009
Rating: 4
Endpapers: a swirl of dancers on red, by the edge of the sea. Very cool.
This is the ancient story that is commerated by the festival of Purim, a joyous celebration in the Jewish year. Since I'm not Jewish but work at a Hebrew day school, I'm a bit familiar with the outline of the story, but not the particulars. I've read that this version sanitizes the story quite a bit, and that a few of the illustratons have "technical" problems (ie: Jews never kneel to pray, but are depicted as doing so in the story). I actually love the illustrations. They cover the page from edge-to-edge in reds, blues, and browns and are quite lovely.
It's a "typical" bible story with greed, self-importance, death....no I'd better not go in that direction, but to be honest, it does contain all those elements. Koralek has omitted drunkeness and decadence and similar actualities, I'm sure.
This is the story of how Esther becomes a Persian queen, hides her Jewishness, and with the help of her cousing Mordecai, who helped raise her, saves the Jewish people from annhialation. You can look up the story on Wikpedia, which will tell it far better than I.
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