The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is the story of creation that the Iroquois tell. The story goes that there once were people who lived in the sky and one day a woman saw some water and wanted to investigate it. Once she gets to the water, the woman begins to create the Earth and all of the things on it. The sky woman has two sons, one who is good and one who is evil. When one twin creates something, the other twin creates something that will complicate what the other has just created. After she is done creating everything, the sky woman throws herself into the fire and returns to the sky. This story is written in the way it would be told by the Iroquois and uses the language that would actually be used to tell the story of creation. One theme of this story is the battle between good and evil. ( )

This story teaches to be thankful for the earth, the rivers, the animals and people. It teaches to give thanks to their creator for having given them life. While I am not a religious person, I feel it is very important to give thanks to the world around us and show respect at all times. I feel as if this book would allow children to see that the world is a delicate place that was created with purpose and we need to care for it as it is all we have.

The Iroquois creation myth is retold in John Bierhorst's The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, which follows its eponymous heroine as she plummets from her heavenly home, to the earth below. Landing upon the back of a massive turtle, the sky woman creates the land as she walks, and then uses the earth to make the stars. Calling the sun into being, she then brings forth two sons - Sapling and Flint - who represent the gentle and hard "minds" of the universe.

Bierhorst, who has retold many Native American tales, includes a brief afterword explaining his source materials, which included Arthur C. Parker's Seneca Myths and Folk Tales. But although I appreciated his documentation, and although I love this story, I have seen better retellings. I'm not sure, moreover, that I really cared for Robert Andrew Parker's gouache and ink illustrations. It's not that this picture-book had no appeal, because it did, but all in all, I think I prefer Joanne Shenandoah and Douglas M. George-Kanentiio's Skywoman: Legends of the Iroquois. ( )

Sapling and Flint.Bierhorst, John(1993), Harper Collins Publishers.
From Publishers Weekly
In this story from the Six Nations, a husband "in the sky country" grows jealous of his wife's pregnancy and pushes her through a hole. She lands softly on the back of a turtle, and creates the land, the stars and the sun. She also gives birth to twins, Flint and Sapling, the first as hard as the other is gentle, who play a part in their mother's work--"Sapling . . . created fish. But Flint threw small bones into them, to make life more difficult . . . " All three return to the sky, where people's thoughts can reach them in the smoke of their fires. This rather noncohesive rendition by Bierhorst, known for his retellings of American Indian stories for older readers, may prove confusing for younger audiences, as several loose ends are left dangling (albeit authentically so). Nevertheless, the story's discontinuities do not seriously detract from a gentle, sensible tale that explains both the rough and the smooth in our world, and significantly portrays a woman as creator. Parker's loosely modeled, intensely colored gouache and pastel illustrations echo the tale's primitive origins and continue this team's fruitful collaboration, also seen in The Monkey's Haircut and The Whistling Skeleton. ( )