The Sea Chest
While waiting for a "stranger," a girl snuggles with her  great-great-aunt, looking at a photo of a small child "touched  so often with hope, the edges curl." This intriguing beginning  launches a touching story-within-a-story. Auntie Maita describes  her loneliness as the only child of a Maine lighthouse keeper.  One morning, after a fierce storm, Maita and her father find a  sea chest wrapped in mattresses. Inside, they find a baby and  this sorrowful note: "We commit this child into the hands of  God. May He save her." Basing her plot on a local legend,  Buzzeo, a Maine school librarian making her picture book debut,  writes with such vivid, sensory-rich language that readers are  almost certain to feel Maita's yearning for companionship and,  later, her joy at having a sister. GrandPr 's (illustrator of  the Harry Potter books) oil paintings, too, communicate the  characters' shifting moods. During the storm, Mama and Maita  peer through the window at Papa as he lurches against the wind  toward the lighthouse. In a shadowy, sea-like, blue-green room,  their candlelit faces exude a deep but stoically controlled  fear. Back in the present, the girl looks expectantly at the  quilt-lined sea chest, which "waits open on the table, for the  tiny stranger my mama and papa have gone to fetch from so far  across the wide Atlantic. To be my sister." Poignant, poetic and  movingly illustrated, this story resonates with sisterly love.  Ages 5-up. (Aug.)Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.