Imagine you were born before the invention of drawing, more than thirty thousand years ago. You would live with your whole family in a cave and see woolly mammoths walk by! You might even see images of animals hidden in the shapes of clouds and rocks. You would want to share these pictures with your family, but wouldn't know how. Who would have made the world's first drawing? Would it have been you? In The First Drawing , Caldecott Medal winner Mordicai Gerstein imagines the discovery of drawing...and inspires the young dreamers and artists of today. K-Gr 3–In this compelling picture book, Gerstein invites children to travel back in time more than 30,000 years to a cave in what is now southern France. Using thickly applied acrylics and rough strokes of black ink, he creates a prehistoric setting complete with a community of early humans, giant woolly mammoths, and one inquisitive caveboy. Told in second-person narrative, the text asks readers to put themselves in the mindset of the boy surrounded by wide-open skies, plush drifting clouds, and a great diversity of flora and fauna. A true artist, the child sees more than the surface appearance of his world. Gerstein's illustrations of rocks, clouds, and shadows cleverly conceal animal shapes that both readers and the protagonist are compelled to discover. At first, the other cave dwellers are dismissive. Then the youngster does something unprecedented: he picks up a burnt stick and begins drawing on the walls. For his fellow early humans, this first taste of art is scary and disconcerting. “Magic!” the boy's father exclaims. It is, in fact, the world's first drawing. An author's note provides background on the real-life drawings in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave and the discovery of a human footprint belonging to an eight-year-old child. Pair this title with Emily Arnold McCully's The Secret Cave (Farrar, 2010) to extend the lesson and learn about the 1940 discovery of the caves in southern France.–Kiera Parrott, Darien Library, CTα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. “Imagine you were born before the invention of drawing more than thirty thousand years ago.” A boy with shaggy red hair dressed in jeans, his back to the viewer, becomes a boy with shaggy red hair dressed in animal skins on the next page. He lives in a cave with a large multigenerational family and spends his time watching deer and bears and looking at clouds. He alone sees shapes where others see, for instance, just a stone. A stare down with a woolly mammoth pushes the boy to recreate its massive shape on the cave wall. And though his family at first fears the drawing’s magic, before long they’re drawing, too. An author’s note introduces French cave drawings, and notes no one knows who made the world’s first drawing. Despite the disclaimer, however, many will see this as fact as well as fancy, in part because of the emphatic audience-directed narrative. The line, acrylic, and colored-pencil art, which fills up each spread, has the buoyant feeling of discovery and is clever in the way it turns imaginings into pictures. A way to think about the start of art. Grades K-2. --Ilene Cooper Fall 2013 Parents' Choice Award 2014 CCBC Choices List Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College 2014 Best Book of the Year "The much-admired illustrator Mordicai Gerstein performs a persuasive bit of magic in The First Drawing...[he] uses delicate ink over rough colorful acrylics in a visual echo of the way the fineness of artistic sensibility might have arisen in primitive Stone Age culture"― The Wall Street Journal *"In this compelling picture book, Gerstein invites children to travel back in time more than 30,000 years to a cave in what is now southern France....Gerstein's illustrations of rocks, clouds, and shadows cleverly conceal animal shapes that both readers and the protagonist are compelled to discover."― School Library Journal (starred review) *"Gerstein's mixed-media spreads feature a mostly blue and brown palette, and thin, rainbow-hued brushstrokes add texture and vividness....Artists see the world differently, but Gerstein suggests their true gift lies in allowing others to share in their visions."― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gerstein's acrylic, pen-and-ink and colored-pencil mixed-media illustrations create depth and a sense of the past, as well as imparting liveliness and possibility...Solid storytelling, satisfying narrative circularity, and masterful, creative illustrations make this an inspiring story for young artists."― Kirkus "The line, acrylic, and colored-pencil art, which fills up each spread, has the buoyant feeling of discovery and is clever in the way it turns imaginings into pictures. A way to think about the start of art."― Booklist "Echoing the simplicity of cave drawings with simply sketched figures, Gerstein enhances them with expressive pen-an