cover image Spider in the Sky

Spider in the Sky

Anne K. Rose. HarperCollins Publishers, $5.79 (24pp) ISBN 978-0-06-025073-7

With illustrations as blue-black as the night itself, this lullaby about a mother returning home to her sleeping infant will comfort small readers. Unlike Brown's Goodnight Moon , the images in Rosenberg's poem are abstract, but its gently rocking rhythms and musical language are soothing. Nature ' s animals dwell just outside the baby's room, as ``Below the window was the sea, / a blue-black mirror, flashing,'' where a fish lives ``with eyes as large and bright as windows.'' Above, a crow steals a tinfoil mirror and takes it to his home, where an owl ``whose eyes are like two shining mirrors'' watches the mother in her car returning home. Above the baby's crib is ``a silver mirror,'' reflecting the silver moon hanging in the window. Richardson's muted paintings are broadly outlined, almost like woodcuts, and the repeated designs nicely echo the tone of the tightly written story. Ages 5 - 7. (Mar.)