Mr. and Mrs. God in the Creation Kitchen
PreSchool-Grade 2–This playful twist on a familiar theme finds the creative couple busy cooking up a storm. First out of the oven is a giant orb, bright and hot. 'I'm going to call it the sun,' Mr. God said. Then it's his wife's turn, naming the next fiery ball Earth, which she cools down by pouring some clouds over it. Now for the creatures, but the first are enormous, ghastly things, a mistake, Mr. God decides, exploding them with a red-hot coal. It's time for something beautiful, says Mrs. God and, filling a bowl with fins and tails and her favorite colors, she pours a multitude of sea creatures into Earth's blue waters. But her husband's next project, a huge flying thing, dives to the ocean and devours her handiwork in one gulp. Mrs. God did not speak to Mr. God for a thousand years. Trying to get back into her good graces, he makes the biggest and most magnificent creature of all–a blue whale. And so it goes until, almost as an afterthought, the chefs form and bake a two-legged couple, who wander off into the world, leaving the bakers to wonder just how they'll turn out. Wood's text is clever and pleasant, though lacking the cadence of Phyllis Root'sBig Momma Makes the World(Candlewick, 2003). The ink-and-acrylic illustrations are both soft and dynamic, with line drawings against a painted background that provide a good balance of the concrete and the amorphous. Tones of gray and blue predominate, but the richly colored picture of the sea creatures pouring from the bowl is a knockout.–Marie Orlando, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NYCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.