Baby Moses in a Basket

This book’s wordless opening spread offers a moment of intense drama: a woman looks anxiously over her shoulder while extending her arm toward a basketed infant carried away on a river. But as Moses floats toward yet-unknown safety, Yacowitz’s gently rolling rhymes and Downing’s inventively framed watercolors—rendered in washes of emerald, citrine, and lapis—he enters a world far more benevolent than what he faced on shore. An ibis nudges the basket out of the shallows with its beak, “Mama Hippo, like a mountain,/ rises upward from the deep” to move him along, and “Mighty Crocodile” shelters him during a sudden storm. By the time Pharaoh’s daughter lifts Moses from the water in this quietly beautiful story, it seems that all of nature has determined to protect the infant. Ages 3–7. [em](Mar.) [/em]