Rainy's Powwow

Lorraine, a Native American girl, is at the Thunderbird Powwow, where she is expected to dance. But she's out of place: ""Lorraine didn't come from a powwow family. She had no uncle to give her an eagle feather. She had no other relatives who could help her learn to dance."" Raczek's (The Night the Grandfathers Danced) premise is convincing, thought-provoking and original, and she appears to have expertise in her subject. Unfortunately, her plot development is cumbersome, with Lorraine's predicament frequently taking a back seat to lengthy and often overwrought descriptive passages. Readers may also become disoriented among competing themes having to do with the girl's duty to a character ambiguously identified as ""the very old woman they called Grandmother White Hair""; her people's code that says ""the honor is to give""; and a complicated denouement, in which an eagle sanctifies Lorraine's embarrassingly awkward dance by dropping a feather in her path. Debut illustrator Bennett employs vivid purples, reds and oranges to heat up landscapes and, less successfully, to emphasize motion in the dancing costumes. His sequencing, however, is choppy, and his pictures do little to help readers to navigate this awkwardly told tale. Ages 5-8. (Apr.)