Rattlesnake Mesa

Review
By Center for Children's Books

(Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books) In a series of tightly crafted vignettes, EdNah New Rider Weber tells of her experiences growing up Navajo in the early twentieth century… Weber’s storytelling captures the wistfulness of a childhood fully lived and well remembered… The black and white photographs… manage to to reinforce the emotional distance and complexity of memory in the stories through their alternating between wide-open landscapes, tight closeups of children’s faces and even more focused images of elderly hands doing beadwork and smoking cedar in ceremonial pottery bowls. This would make an intriguing counterbalance or alternative to Rinaldi’s My Heart is on the Ground (BCCB 2/99) to bring the study of the Native American experience into the twentieth century.