The Gift Stone

In this sentimental tale, an opal miner's daughter finds a precious gem that grants her wish. ""This town is dust and rock and digging machines and sky. Come, I'll show you where we live... underground,"" narrator Jean begins. In the Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, Jean and her father do indeed live beneath the earth in a dark, rock-lined dwelling, a dimly lit life subtly underscored by the book's brown pages. From this earth-colored backdrop emerge Garns's (Gonna Sing My Head Off!) soft pastel images of life above ground, where Jean sifts through rock piles for shiny bits of opal that the miners have missed. Staring into one such shard, she sees ""colors you don't see anywhere else in Coober Pedy. It's like all the bright green and purple and red that we ought to have out here got trapped inside rock."" She connects these colors to those outside the window at her grandparents' snug home in nearby Adelaide and wishes they could afford to board her there. Jean's dream is realized after she discovers an opal imbedded in the wall of her aunt's underground house (they are miners, too). While Eversole (Flood Fish) builds some interesting details about this unorthodox lifestyle, she doesn't develop the relationships among the characters. Because readers see little of Jean's interaction with her grandparents, they may well question how she could so easily leave her father behind, even considering her dreary surroundings. Garns's pastels capably portray the narrator but they, too, rarely show Jean interacting with others. In the end, Jean seems as isolated above ground as she did beneath it. Ages 5-8. (Oct.)