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Title: Child to the Waters by James E. Kibler ISBN: 1-58980-095-8 Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Read it once as a class assignment, read it again because...
Comment: I couldn't help it! This book will be with me the rest of my life! I plan to share its store of literary treasures with my children after they are born, knowing they'll love the stories as "young'uns," and appreciate the beauty, wisdom, and wit when they're older. If you are going to buy just one book this year to expand your universe, make it THIS one! Everyone who reads from it wants a copy for themselves, which I'll help with as I am able. This book and this book ALONE fully restored my pride in my Southern heritage, which seemed lost to years spent in other lands. The TV and other popular mediums have painted a rather unflattering picture of the South and her people, but this book shatters those mundane and (largely) unfounded stereotypes. This book took me back to the Piedmont of North Carolina, where parts of my childhood were spent in the company of some of the best people I have ever known. I can't say enough, so just BUY IT! BUY IT! BUY IT! If you have any interest in Southern heritage and culture, simply want to read inspired short fiction, or like a bit of wisdom in your stories, get Child to the Waters.

Rating: 5
Summary: Songs Without Music
Comment: The folk tale is a hybrid creature, part history, part gossip, part flight of fancy. They almost always contain characters that tie them to the myths and legends of the past while their voice and themes are tied firmly to the present.

James Everett Kibler has blended local stories of the South with a deft had at imagery to create a collection of stories that slip effortlessly into established folklore. Told in prose that is by turns lyrical, earthy and eldritch, his tales beg to be heard in the glow of a campfire on a warm summer night to the accompanying chants of crickets.

"Our storyteller," he writes in the Prelude, "has decreed that here, the rules that govern the modern mind, so rigidly shaped by reductive science, neither guide nor apply."

Rather, the imagination is called to drift into places where the evidence of the senses is not always trustworthy and is certainly no advantage.

Appropriately, he begins with a ghost story, based on a local legend heard in many places throughout the South: "The Night Her Portrait Sang." Then, as if aware of the need to keep at least one foot firmly planted on solid earth, he follows with two tales of family and the enduring power of love.

Mr. Kibler's stories are meant to be savored, the taste of their imagery rolled over the tongue like the very best wine, their sweetness and bitterness equally appreciated because both are necessary. Filled as they are with laughter, tears, courage, desperation, fear and triumph, love is, in fact, the recurring theme. It is the root of both good and evil-love of man and woman, parent and child, love for the earth and one's heritage.

This book is a delightful experience that, for sheer reading pleasure, is not to be missed.

Rating: 5
Summary: Magical Prose Poetry
Comment: This book, a collection of short fictions, sings. Because the tales are not short stories with well developed characters and plot development and because they are truly lyrical, Child to the Waters should be described as prose poetry. And it works; the volume's language, including allusions, is rich and captivating. We need this language. As with the best lyric poems, though there is no traditional development, the characters are real to us, speaking to our hearts, because they are grounded in truth.