Moonfall

The crescent moon hangs very low, ``like an earring on the rim of the sky,'' and Sylvie is distraught. She knows the moon is falling, but her indifferent parents try to explain away the terrifying phenomenon. After 15 nights of moonless sky, however, the girl resurrects the lunar wreck from her neighbor's lilac bushes and washes it in a soap-bubble concoction. It dissolves, leaving a luminous liquid. But when the curious youngster dips the soap-bubble wand in and blows out a pearly globe, it rises into the sky to become a proper, well-behaved moon. Although the moon's substance is more elusive than green cheese (it is a ``crust,'' but also ``jagged'' and ``rusty'' like rigid metal), children will not be stalled by the dreamlike vagaries of this debut author's text. Lehman's ( Abracadabra to Zigzag ) neat but softly rendered watercolor and ink illustrations, meanwhile, variously capture the magnitude of land and sky as well as the intimacy of home. Ages 3-8. (June)