What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
Query abandoned by poster
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ABANDONED. Gods Create World, and then Create Boy to Give Animals/Objects Names
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I think your patron may have posted on here before some years ago. Or, someone else is also searching for the book. https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...?
Hope this one gets solved. It sounds like a great book.
I was wondering if that person knew of this group and had tried here before. Thank you for letting me know, especially since this was back in 2013 and would have been hard for me to find it. I'm wondering if I should delete this thread or leave it up because it's newer?
No, you should keep it up. A few questions that the person may remember:
Was this part of a series?
What things did the boy name? Mountains, animals, plants, etc?
Were these mythical creatures/objects?
When the boy would ask the gods "what is that called," were the gods down on the planet with him? Or, would he look up to the heavens and ask? In other words, how did the boy communicate with the gods?
Did he have any sidekicks? Any villains? Main conflict of the story?
Hopefully some of these questions will trigger a memory.
Mod
Mod
No response in 2 years. Moving to Abandoned.
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I am in search of a book that I read from childhood in the mid 1990s that I cannot seem to locate anywhere.
The story begins with many gods/deities in the universe that have just finished creating a world, and they are quarreling amongst each other because no object or creature in the world was given a name yet. So the deities decide to create a boy (or assign a boy, I don't remember exactly how they pick the boy) in the newly created world the task of
naming everything for them. Thus, the boy goes on many adventures traveling to distant places and giving names to everything. So in a sense, it is like a version of the story in Genesis of the Bible, except Adam is a boy.
So for example, if the boy came across an object or creature, he would ask the gods "What is this called?" and they would respond something like "That's up to you to decide" along those lines.
The author could have had influence or have been inspired by foreign creation stories/myths/legends (Indian/Arabic, possibly Greek/Persian/Chinese?). It is also possible that the book could have been translated into English from another language.
It seemed like a book aimed for children, yet it was fairly thick and was a chapter book. The copy I had was a hardback may have had a dustjacket, color was offwhite with decent spine thickness ((roughly 5/5.5 x 8" dimensions, about .5" thick). It was published before 1998, and could be
from any decade before the 90s.
The cover was colorful, featuring an illustrated image of the boy looking down on a cloud, with short black hair, wearing white (his eyes are looking downward) with a celestial background - stars, *maybe* moon also. I know it may sound like the Little Prince or the Neverending Story, but I
know for sure it is neither of those.