THE FIRST KOSHARE
A Fictional Native American Clown

      “A modern storytelling of some ancient legends and myths, this is a delightful blend of the old and new. The Koshare clown, humorous and mischievous, is a familiar figure in Native American animal tales and mythology. Otis, a resident of the Southwest and a long-time scholar of Native American culture, has written about the birth and beginnings of this amusing and likable figure. There are other memorable characters in the book and they too come directly from old legends. Readers will not be able to forget Magpie or Skunk as they share Koshare’s first days and instruct and guide him in his new and wondrous world. The book is enhanced by the author’s own drawings which convey so well the action in the stories and the varied emotional responses of Koshare, Magpie and Skunk. This is a good book to read aloud for the poetic language and its rhythm is closely associated with that in Native American stories.”
     
      —“Book Chat,” Enchantment
     
     
            “Many attempts have been made to capture the ‘magic’ of the beings from the mythologies of non-western cultures. It is a tricky business. One measure of the success of these attempts is not whether we or our children find the resultant concoctions delightful, but rather whether the appropriated characters would still be recognizable to the people from whose cosmologies they had been lifted. In this instance, I’m afraid, the Pueblo people wouldn’t find much that was familiar.”
     
      —Books of the Southwest