You're Safe with Me

It's time for bed, but the dark, stormy sky prevents four baby animals--a monkey, a loris, a tiger and a pangolin--from finding sleep. Fortunately, Mama Elephant is passing by and notices their restlessness. As she rocks them with her trunk, she tells them, "You're safe with me." When they fret about the wind, she consoles them, "He's an old friend of the forest. He brings us seeds from faraway lands." And the thunder? It "brings us water from the sea and makes this forest grow from scattered seeds." The sound and sight of lightning, the rumble of the river--Mama Elephant has a soothing explanation and a "You're safe with me" for everything.

Chitra Soundar's text has the rhythm of a song, with call-like verses and response-like "You're safe with me" chorus. Poonam Mistry's illustrations in nighttime hues support the story's folkloric setting, giving the pages of You're Safe with Me the look of elaborate quilts in which geometric shapes are fused into emblems of the natural world; a frog, for one, looks as though it's embroidered out of circles, rectangles, triangles and ovals. Each spread is so densely packed--occasionally the text must bend to fit an illustration's contours--that some have a visual puzzle-like quality. As the four baby animals nestle in Mama Elephant's trunk, they assume a teardrop shape, and it's not clear where one ends and another begins--just right in a book about how, though we come from many different mothers, we're all in this together. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

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