It Rained on the Desert Today

The drama of seasonal change quickens a girl's first-person account of the first summer rain in the Southwestern desert. The narrator's elation at the storm expands in Tracy's satisfying visual studies of the responses of animals, people and sun-scorched landscape. Startling if occasionally forced perspectives evoke the grandeur of the storm and its power to renew life in seemingly barren surroundings. In one charming sequence, toddlers romp in the downpour until ``they look like mud babies born from the earth herself.'' The furious rain dwindles to a rainbow, then cedes to a fiery, quiescent sunset. There is, however, a ragged quality about the book. Small motifs amplifying the narrative and appearing opposite full-page illustrations seem superfluous, and the text sometimes distracts by pulling readers into a perception of rhythm only to push them into prose. Ages 4-up. (Apr.)