Praise for "Stellarella!"

Now Featured at the Patheos Book Club
Stellarella! It's Saturday!
By Deborah W. Dykes
Illustrations by Christina Mattison Ebert-Klaven

What People Are Saying

"This charming little book fills in the spaces in a culture where children and grandmothers get separated as families change and shift and meld and move. It touches the emotional chasm where memories are the only thing left to make the connections real. This book remembers the good things that happened in the past and brings comfort to the empty places in the heart of both child and grandmother. Even better, it promises an even more loving future together. This book is a certain read and a living promise for many."
—Joan Chittister, OSB, author of Following the Path 

"Dear Mothers & Fathers: This is a beautifully subtle and profoundly intuitive vision in which a young girl's earliest imagination moves instinctively from a mother who runs the kitchen to a God who runs the world. If women produce food and women prepare food, how is God not female? How could it be otherwise, Tank?"
—John Dominic Crossan, author of The Power of Parable 

"An exuberant first-person voice begins this story, first in a planned series, with a burst of energy that maintains momentum: "It's Saturday! Tank! Wake Up!" Conversing with her dog in a stream-of-thought narrative, Stellarella, a redhead in purple dress with feathered headband, pronounces her plans for market day, which include visits to an ethnically diverse group of women: Ms. Sadie sells jelly; Ms. Leanna, tomatoes; Ms. Maria, zucchini. Ebert-Klaven's illustrations of home and market offer geometric stripes, checks, and polka-dots, while black squiggles outline characters' hair, background hills, bushes, and clouds. The paintings, which depict scenes from a variety of angles, brim with energy and motion; one shows Stellarella holding a cornucopia of vegetables, a rainbow behind her, and saying: "Tank, did you know God makes strawberries? She grows them from seeds she plants in the dirt... she's as busy as Mama!" With subtlety, Dykes demonstrates how Stellarella's exposure to strong, resilient women helps shape her character, making this story both entertaining and substantive. All ages. (July)"
—Publishers Weekly 

Praise for Stellarella! Seashells on the Seashore (Fall 2013)

"There are many ways to change the world, and our stereotypes about God, but what better place to begin than with children reading or being read to? Stellarella is back, and this time she's at the seashore with some very special friends, listening for the sound of God breathing in a seashell. Surrounded by a community of strong women, and given permission to be who she is, a child of God, Stellarella does a simple, but profound thing: she hears the feminine voice of God, and no one corrects her. The sound we hear in this delightful book is the sound of the world changing.

—Robin Meyers, author of The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive

"Stellarella and Tank will charm anybody of any age. Like all really good children's literature, the stories of their adventures carry great profundity in very clear, very simple, and very lovely words and images. The child of your heart will love these stories, and so will the child in you."

—Phyllis Tickle, compiler, The Divine Hours