THE SPIDER WHO CREATED THE WORLD

``When the sky was young and the world just a dream . . . a spider named Nobb came floating through the air'' looking for a safe haven for her ripening egg. Turned away by the moon, the sun, and a cloud, she stretches a web across the sky and catches them, biting off a little piece of each and wrapping it in sticky thread. Then clever Nobb creates ``the Earth with the Fire inside it,'' by wrapping the piece of moon round and round the piece of sun. She lays her egg between two mountains and out come not only spiderlings, but all the beings that ``fill the world to this day.'' MacDonald (Let's Make a Noise, 1992, etc.) offers an original and well-paced creation myth, simply and beautifully illustrated with Karas's unusually bold spreads in acrylic and gouache, featuring wide expanses of sky, silvery gray around the moon, a rich deep red near the sun, and cool watery green around the cloud- -all webbed over with the fine white lines of Nobb's sticky thread. Most of the pictures are serenely simple, which makes the teeming life bursting from the egg all the more magnificent. A generous work, in which text and artwork are fully bound to one another. (Picture book. 4-8)