THE LADY AND THE SPIDER

A might-have-been-true story about the life of a spider living in a lettuce bed. The spider makes its home in a dark, hidden space between two leaves of lettuce. One morning, it breakfasts on a moth that has drowned in the dew; another, it eats an unwary fly. The lady who owns the garden comes out each day to weed and tend her plants and pick a head of lettuce for her lunch, unaware of the tiny spider. Her footsteps shake the earth and her dress brushes the spider's home. One day, she picks the lettuce that is the spider's home and carries it indoors. When she discovers the spider, she is fascinated by its color, which matches the lettuce, by its tiny legs waving back and forth, by its tiny life, just as important as any life. Taking the spider back to the garden, she puts it on another lettuce. This is Marstall's first book. The drawings, in light greens and blues, show the lettuce, the lady, the world from the spider's perspective--vast hills and deep valleys of lettuce, an enormous, bespectacled face looking down: attractive, accurate, somewhat static, but in keeping with the quiet text.