Market!

famous marketplaces takes an everyday experience as an occasion to explore ethnic diversity. In Uganda, barefoot people walk to market ""through the rain forest beneath the Mountains of the Moon,"" while at New York's Fulton Fish Market, ""hard men in rubber boots... yell and argue in the artificial day of fluorescent lights."" The vigor of a Moroccan market is rivaled only by the ""kicking, biting, and screaming"" in the donkey parking lot. Lewin (Peppe the Lamplighter) photographs his subjects before painting them in the studio, and his watercolors reflect the camera's stop-action immediacy. His dynamic, densely populated compositions make expert use of perspective to yank readers into the scene-sometimes with the unsettling, intriguing feeling that they have caught someone's eye. At the end of the whirlwind bustle, the adventure turns reflective with the final illustration, which depicts the vast, lonely, utterly still Sahara stretching behind the market in Morocco ""like a giant tidal wave that on a whim might bury the oasis, the town, and the market forever."" What a way to travel. Ages 5-up. (Apr.)