Gemma and the Baby Chick

This heartening picture book unsentimentally highlights the wonder of new life on a farm. Gemma helps her mother tend to a broody hen and later, amid the scurrying of newborn chicks, realizes that not all the eggs have hatched. Warm water revives the chick inside one of them, and though the newcomer must be quickly restored to the hen lest it be rejected as foreign, Gemma has the satisfaction of having witnessed and aided its arrival. Barber's direct yet warm text demonstrates a keen awareness of a child's perspective--Gemma wonders whether the chirping coming from the eggs is ``like talking in bed after the light was out,'' and worries about slow hatchers because ``she was often late herself''--and Littlewood's soft, soothing watercolors are in close accord. Placed around and about the text, their spare rusticity affectingly depicts the story's high points. The book's portrayal of an apparently single mother--one clearly in tune with her daughter, whose curiosity and concerns she treats with kindness and respect--is an unheralded but not incidental plus. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)