From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 3?Heavy-lidded, frowning, seamed, and baggy-eyed, the mournful Moses on the cover of Fisher's book looks like he has already foreseen how ineffectual the stone tablets at his fingertips will be. Admittedly, he's been through a lot, what with intransigent Egyptians and backsliding Israelites. His God is a heavyweight, too, devising gruesome plagues, wiping out Pharaoh's army, and then slaying the 3,000 exiles who forgot themselves with the golden calf. Moses is as uncompromising as his God, who allows him only a glimpse of the Promised Land before he dies. Fisher's art emphasizes the starkness of the narrative. Human figures (their faces wholly or partly obscured) barely hold their own before the crushing vastness of the sky, Mount Sinai, the water-walls of the Red Sea, or the Brutalist architecture of Kadesh. This vengeful God and stern, flawed patriarch are certainly a strand of Western tradition, and Fisher's retelling (with God speaking in the awe-full cadences of the King James Version) takes Moses beyond the usual Ten Commandments scene. Nevertheless, Mordicai Gerstein's The Shadow of a Flying Bird (Hyperion, 1994), although focused on Moses's death and not his life, gives a much more positive impression of the patriarch and his achievements.?Patricia (Dooley) Lothrop Green, St. George's School, Newport, RI
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Ages 4^-10. Fisher's version of the biblical story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt suggests a great staged pageant, with richly colored paintings in the artist's signature style. Each double-page spread captures a mythic drama, with the Old Testament figures bold against mountain, desert, and sky, from the hiding of the baby in the bulrushes to the coming of the plagues, the parting of the waters, the wandering in the desert, and the receiving of the Ten Commandments. In one powerful close-up, Moses is horrified to see an Egyptian slave-master beating an Israelite. In another scene, God shows his power to Moses in the flames of the burning bush. The text is longer than usual for Fisher, and he combines biblical style and God's thundering cadence ("let My people go!" ) with a plain, sometimes colloquial, telling ("I have made a terrible mistake," Pharaoh says). Of course, this is the Passover story, but it's also the story of the oppressed everywhere and their struggle to be "free at last." Hazel Rochman
