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    The Old Country
    Unavailable
    The Old Country
    Unavailable
    The Old Country
    Audiobook3 hours

    The Old Country

    Written by Mordicai Gerstein

    Narrated by Tovah Feldshuh

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Mordicai Gerstein's portrayal of Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, won the 2004 Caldecott Medal and was among the most admired books of the year. Now comes a memorable new work, a novel of singular insight and imagination that transports readers to the Old Country, where "every winter was a hundred years and every spring a miracle . . . where the water was like music and the music was like water . . . where all the fairy tales come from, where there was magic-and there was war."

    There, Gisella stares a moment too long into the eyes of a fox, and she and the fox exchange shape. Gisella's quest to get her girl-body back takes her on a journey across a war-ravaged country that has lost its shape. She encounters sprites, talking animals, a chicken that lays a golden egg, a court with a spider for a judge-and bloodshed, destruction, and questions of power and justice. Finally, looking into the eyes of the fox once more, she faces a strange and startling choice about her own nature.

    The Old Country is at once timeless and contemporary-a tale that draws on a wealth of storytelling tradition and dramatizes the question of what it is to be human. Part adventure story, part fable; exciting, beautifully told, rich in humor and wisdom, it is the work of an artist and storyteller at the height of his powers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 24, 2005
    ISBN9780307245458
    Unavailable
    The Old Country
    Author

    Mordicai Gerstein

    Mordicai Gerstein (1935-2019) is the author and illustrator of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, winner of the Caldecott Medal, and has had many books named New York Times Best Illustrated Books of the Year. Gerstein was born in Los Angeles in 1935. He remembers being inspired as a child by images of fine art, which his mother cut out of Life magazine, and by children’s books from the library: “I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.” He attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and then got a job in an animated cartoon studio that sent him to New York, where he designed characters and thought up ideas for TV commercials. When a writer named Elizabeth Levy asked him to illustrate a humorous mystery story about two girls and a dog, his book career began, and soon he moved on to writing as well as illustrating. The author of more than forty books, Gerstein lived in Westhampton, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for The Old Country

    4/5

    32 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting. Weird, but interesting. It's almost fairy-tale-ish, but not quite - all the events are straight from one fairy tale or another, but the consequences are quite realistic. A very strange story! I'm glad I read it, though I'm not sure I'll ever reread it.
    • 4/5
      first line: "Great-Grandmother Gisella was from the Old Country, a country whose name and borders have changed so many times that no one knows anymore what it had been called originally."A modern fairy tale with modern sensibilities, The Old Country still manages to convey an otherworldly sense of magical possibility. Themes of hope, desire, and personal consequences are not lost, even among larger themes of war and violence.