Will Moses' Mother Goose

Starred review from July 21, 2003
In a marvelous match of style and content, Moses's (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) sprightly folk-art oil paintings make this a "must have" Mother Goose volume. The book's tempo is set from the first page, which intersperses thumbnail vignettes with individual rhymes, all of them set off against a crisp white backdrop. A turn of the page then blends the vignettes into a full-bleed panorama of busy village life, where Humpty Dumpty, for example, sits on a wall watching over the man from St. Ives with his seven wives and all their cats; in the distance Little Bo Peep looks for her sheep, and so on. The effect is captivating, and the conceit promises great fun for youngest readers, who will be able to identify the characters on the quieter pages, then scour the pleasingly cluttered spreads to search for them all over again. The 60-plus entries include everyone from Wee Willie Winkie to Old Mother Hubbard, and Moses tucks in some lesser-known rhymes ("A thatcher of Thatchwood," for instance) among all the old favorites. The book concludes with a selection of riddles, along with an afterword about Mother Goose's origins. Ages 3-up.