Decades of turning myth into gorgeously imaged picture books culminates in McDermott’s powerful rendering of the creation story. He boldly speaks in the voice of the Creator: “I was before time. I was everywhere. . . . Then I breathed light into the dark.” The drumbeat of creation goes on, dividing the mists “sweet and salt” and bringing the earth out of the sea, lights in the heavens to mark the seasons, birds and fish, animals moving over the earth, and man and woman. The language, rooted not only in Genesis of the Hebrew Bible but in a muscular familiarity with many other creation myths, thunders and rolls in perfect counterpoint to the astonishing images. Inspired, he says in an author’s note, by Japanese hand-made mulberry-bark papers, he uses gesso, fabric, and paint to create strongly textured surfaces both beautifully abstract and utterly concrete. The sun fills a page and spills over to the next; the blue moon is surrounded by a halo of stars; below both, an arc of growing things from palm frond to frozen branch marks the turn of time. Accessible to small children but resonant enough for older ones, reverent and magnificent. (Picture book/nonfiction. 4-10)
