#701 of 1001 · July 2, 2022

Today brings my total number of book reviews to seven hundred. I’m delighted to have come this far, and I’m not done yet! Thanks as always for reading these posts and leaving friendly comments along the way. To mark the occasion, here’s a book that sank its claws into me when I was young: Verna Aardema and Susan Meddaugh’s Bimwili & the Zimwi. At the beach, a young girl finds an enormous, beautiful seashell. On the way home, she realizes she has forgotten the shell, but her older sisters refuse to turn around, so she returns to the beach alone. The shell has been found by a zimwi, a wrinkled old ogre who lures Bimwili closer and closer until he snatches her up. He stuffs her into a large drum, lugs her from village to village, and commands her to sing. One day, Bimwili hears familiar voices and discovers that the zimwi has reached her very own community. She cleverly modifies the lyrics of her song to alert her relatives, who sneak her out of the drum to safety. In a closing episode, Bimwili and her sisters again escape from the zimwi, who has transformed into an enormous pumpkin. Aardema retells this chilling tale with a compelling voice, including onomatopoeias for sound effects such as laughter, scuttling crab legs, and magical transformations. Meddaugh’s illustrations create a cheerful landscape of village, jungle, and ocean. The pitted face of the sickly green zimwi, all sinister smiles and furious frowns, serves as a sharp deviation from the peaceful surroundings. A note for folklore enthusiasts: Aardema here adapts her own story “Little Sister and the Zimwi” (published in her 1969 book Tales for the Third Ear), itself a retelling of the tale “Watoto na Zimwi” (“The Children and the Zimwi”), published by Henri Junod in Kibaraka: Swahili Stories in 1896. #ocean #sea #shell #drum #pumpkin #book #books #childrensbooks #beautifulbook #beautifulbooks #beautifulbookcovers #picturebook #picturebooks #picturebookillustration #picturebookillustrations #picturebookart #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks