RAINBOW RIDER

This facile, sentimental pseudofolktale, full of gratuitous phrases and self-conscious cadence but without the high polish that elsewhere disguises the insubstantiality of Yolen's tales, could be either a self parody or a reject from The Girl Who Cried Flowers (below). Beginning "in the time before time" when the desert-dwelling Rainbow Rider (he was Rainbow Maker first) decides to "make me a friend," it describes his unsuccessful attempts to make a man of sand and tumbleweed and cactus (as "the time came in and the time went out and soon it was another time"), his consequent tears which he tosses into the sky to form a rainbow, and his success when "this time because he had made the arch of his own bright tears . . . there was someone waiting at the rainbow's end." At this point Foreman's watercolors, heretofore glowing and spare, burst into a sort of pale Peter Max vision of heavenly glory which quite matches the story's sensibility. An impoverished corruption of the Indian creation myths it's intended to "evoke.