Big Mama Makes the World

‘When Big Mama made the world, she didn’t mess about.’ A stout yet energetic housewife with a baby on her hip, Big Mama takes time off from baking and doing to laundry to create the world in six days. On the seventh day, of course, she rests. Root’s poetic, cadenced text is colloquial and direct and lends tremendous authority to this unusual take on the creation story – the reader, just like the sun and the moon, would not dream of defying Big Mama. The naked baby observes mum’s creations with a lively and benign interest. Whether s/he is a girl or a boy is not revealed by virtue of discreet positioning, perhaps with the US market in mind – there were once demands that Sendak’s naked baby boy in The Night Kitchen be given a nappy.

If one can be both epic and homely, Oxenbury brings it off in her superb artworks which make confident use of this book’s generously large format to convey the grandeur of creation alongside the domestic cosiness of this supermum and her large and beautiful baby.