#993 of 1001 · April 20, 2023

Welcome back, Gentle Readers, to my Final Ten Books, the counting down of ten magical reviews to conclude my thousand picture books. Andrew Matthews and Justin Todd offer a poignant, emotionally rich creation myth: The Jar of the Sun. A young boy lives with his parents in a strange, untamed landscape. His every whim is their command. When he calls for ice, they collect it from a mountain peak; when he wants fire, they retrieve it from a volcano. After he demands light, his parents trap the sun in a jar, snare the moon in a web, and throw the stars into a bowl of water. Exhausted by the effort, they grow old and crumble into dust. The boy, desperate to escape his newfound loneliness, treks across the land until he hears a quiet song emerging from the lips of a girl sleeping on top of a mountain. To wake her, he releases the stars, the moon, and finally the sun. Matthews takes what could have been a simple morality tale and expands it into an unexpected cosmogony, a fanciful beginning to a universe born out of flawed human emotion, concluding with the enigmatic, unforgettable line, “And everything began.” Todd’s richly colored drawings create deep appeal and anchor the mysterious setting to reality. #jar #sun #boy #fire #ice #moon #star #stars #girl #creation #earth #world #book #books #childrensbooks #picturebook #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks