Noah's Ark

Peter Spier opens his retelling of the flood with his own translation of a short Dutch poem by the seventeenth century writer Jacobus Revius, sixty lines running just three syllables each, and then sets the poem aside for nearly forty pages of pictures that carry almost the entire book from there. Noah and his family load pairs of animals aboard the ark, plank by plank, and Spier's fine pen and watercolor drawings crowd every spread with more creatures and more mess than the text ever mentions: elephants leaning against the rail, monkeys stealing fruit meant for other animals, the family mucking out stalls in the rain while the flood rises outside the hull. The ark rides out the storm and the long wait for the waters to recede, and the book ends the way the Book of Genesis does, with the animals streaming back onto dry land and Noah's family beginning again on solid ground.

Because so little of the story is told in words, Noah's Ark rewards a slow look more than a fast read aloud; a parent can narrate what a page shows rather than what it says, and a child poring over the crowded spreads alone will keep finding jokes and small dramas an adult reader skims past, a mouse cornered by a cat, a goat chewing on the ship's charts. That density suits children old enough to sit with a picture for a while, roughly four through eight, better than the youngest toddlers, who need the plainer rhythm of a text driven story to hold their attention.

Spier drew both the animals and the ark's crowded, workaday interior from research into period ships and livestock, and the result reads less like a bedtime miracle and more like an honest account of hard, muddy labor that happens to end in survival. Even readers who know the Bible story well tend to be surprised by how much of the book is simply chores, feeding, cleaning, keeping animals from killing each other in close quarters, rather than spectacle.