DEBRA FRASIER is the creator of Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster and its companion book, The Incredible Water Show, as well as Out of the Ocean. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
K-Gr 4-- All young children believe themselves to be the center of everything; here is a book that allows them to maintain that stance while learning just what makes up the universe. Through prose both gentle and sure, Frasier informs her audience: ``On the eve of your birth/ word of your coming/passed from animal to animal.'' Moreover, ``the quiet Moon glowed/ and offered to bring/ a full, bright face/ each month,/ to your windowsill . . . .'' Simple paper collages in warm, vibrant hues depict a childlike form moving through a world that curves and bends, nutures and welcomes. In some scenes the child is rendered in shades of buff or light yellow, but appears just as often as red-brown, darker brown, or black. The text reads like unrhymed poetry, and both parents and educators will find themselves wanting to share this book over and over with individuals and with groups. A three-page appendix that includes minature versions of each spread elaborates on natural phenomena for older readers--migrating animals, spinning Earth, rising tide, falling rain, growing trees, and more. A book filled with reverence for the natural order of the world and the place of the individual within it.-- Eve Larkin, Chicago Public Library
Offering a curious amalgam of the mystical and the scientific, Frasier's first picture book is a paean to nature and to birth. The poetic text explains how the sun, moon, ocean tides, rain, trees, air, animals and people of the world work together to create a welcoming setting for a baby's arrival. Young readers will find Frasier's rhythmic passages soothing, if not always entirely comprehensible: ``On the day you were born the Moon pulled on the ocean below, and, wave by wave, a rising tide washed the beaches clean for your footprints. . . .'' The volume concludes with notes on the natural and technical phenomena mentioned in the text, including animal migration, the rotation of the earth, gravity, stellar constellations and precipitation. Illustrating this unusual book, Frasier's paper collages feature a mostly muted palette of earth tones that is somewhat lacking in child appeal. Though it might spark interesting discussions with an older child, this work will be over the heads of little ones. All ages. (Mar.)
"A book filled with reverence for the natural order of the world
and the place of the individual in it."--School Library
Journal (starred review) "Reading this picture book aloud to a
child, even the most jaded among us may feel again the sheer
miracle of our human existence.
A+"--Entertainment Weekly
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