Amazon.com: The All Jahdu Storybook (9780152394981): Virginia Hamilton, Barry Moser: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 1991 | Age Level: 8 and up | Grade Level: 3 and up

Virginia Hamilton has once again brought her well-loved trickster, the invisible Jahdu, to life in this updated collection of eleven previously published, and four newly created, stories. Jahdu is based on a centuries-old folklore tradition, yet the tales themselves are original and drawn from Hamilton’s imagination. “The language is vigorous and masterfully honed, while the character of lively, powerful, self-defining Jahdu has appeal.”--Kirkus Reviews

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Virginia Hamilton has once again brought her well-loved trickster, the invisible Jahdu, to life in this updated collection of eleven previously published, and four newly created, stories. Jahdu is based on a centuries-old folklore tradition, yet the tales themselves are original and drawn from Hamilton’s imagination. “The language is vigorous and masterfully honed, while the character of lively, powerful, self-defining Jahdu has appeal.”--Kirkus Reviews

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 3-6-- A collection of 11 previously told tales and 4 completely new ones. In the original stories, The Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu (1969) , Time-Ago Lost (1973, both Macmillan; both o.p.) , and Jahdu (Greenwillow, 1980; o.p.), Mama Luka entertains her young charge, Lee Edward, by plucking stories about Jadhu out of the air and tasting them before passing them on. In these reconstructed versions, Mama Luka has been removed and Jahdu emerges as the central character, an ``all-out trickster, magical and devilish, good and bad, imp and elf.'' These mythical tales are set in a fantasti cal place and time to convey mystery, adventure, humor, and enjoyment. Moser's striking watercolors show texture and consistency of drama without ever portraying the diminutive fellow graphically. Readers and listeners will find delight and wonder in these tales. A storyteller's treasure.
- Helen E. Williams, formerly at University of Maryland, College Park
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

In 1969, Hamilton published The Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu, four tales about a trickster boy-hero who expressed his sense of freedom by ``running along'' and whose favorite exclamation was ``Woogily!'' Like those in Time-Ago Lost (1973), they were set in a framing story about ``Mama Luka'' in ``a fine, good place called Harlem,'' telling her stories to young Lee Edward. Now Hamilton drops the framing story, adds a central section (``Jahdu Adventure'') with four new pieces (including one involving the giant Trouble as a robot and one in which Jahdu encounters several folkloric characters), and tightens and reshapes the whole. By eliminating the explicit celebration of pride in the black experience, she highlights the rich blend of creation myths, philosophies, and folklore that inspired these tales; they seem more universal here than they did in the earlier setting. But they are still not easy; like the later books in the Justice series, they can be hard to follow, their events imposed by symbols that seem arbitrarily intertwined. Still, the language is vigorous and masterfully honed, while the character of lively, powerful, self-defining Jahdu has appeal even though some of his adventures are less than compelling. Moser contributes the attractive design and 20 beautifully painted glimpses of the scenes and characters in Jahdu's world. (Fiction. 8-12) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Virginia Hamilton Page

Virginia Esther Hamilton was born, as she said, "on the outer edge of the Great Depression," on March 12, 1934. The youngest of five children of Kenneth James and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton, Virginia grew up amid a large extended family in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The farmlands of southwestern Ohio had been home to her mother's family since the late 1850s, when Virginia's grandfather, Levi Perry, was brought into the state as an infant via the Underground Railroad.

Virginia graduated at the top of her high-school class and received a full scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs. In 1956, she transferred to the Ohio State University in Columbus and majored in literature and creative writing. She moved to New York City in 1958, working as a museum receptionist, cost accountant, and nightclub singer, while she pursued her dream of being a published writer. She studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research under Hiram Haydn, one of the founders of Atheneum Press.

It was also in New York that Virginia met poet Arnold Adoff. They were married in 1960. Arnold worked as a teacher, and Virginia was able to devote her full attention to writing, at least until daughter Leigh was born in 1963 and son Jaime in 1967. In 1969, Virginia and Arnold built their "dream home" in Yellow Springs, on the last remaining acres of the old Hamilton/Perry family farm, and settled into a life of serious literary work and achievement.

In her lifetime, Virginia wrote and published 41 books in multiple genres that spanned picture books and folktales, mysteries and science fiction, realistic novels and biography. Woven into her books is a deep concern with memory, tradition, and generational legacy, especially as they helped define the lives of African Americans. Virginia described her work as "Liberation Literature." She won every major award in youth literature.