The Story of the Creation - Hardcover

Jane Ray's distinctive style has established her as a highly successful artist both for her paintings and her wrapping paper and cards. Increasingly well-known too as an illustrator, her picture books have attracted enormous attention around the world.

PreSchool-Grade 5-- "Creation" may be a mind-stretching concept, but these gorgeously colored, naively proportioned, multiple vignettes make it manageable, as well as beautiful. Even the formless void is depicted, contained by arched, gold-edged framing; but orderliness is matched by profusion, for the artist as well as for God. Folk-art exuberance, sapphire and emerald hues, and decorative detail mark Ray's style and reflect Creation's rich abundance. Curio-box borders offer closeup samples of this bounty: e.g. eggs, feathers, wings, etc. accompanying the creation of "fowl." The brief King James text faithfully replicates "a not "the" story of how the world began," which ends with a honey-colored Eve and a dusky Adam tenderly companionable in a pre-serpent Eden. A celebration of the Genesis tradition that's as rich and lovely as Ray's Noah's Ark (1990) and Story of Christmas (1991, both Dutton). --Patricia Dooley, University of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.