ALYTE

A midwife toad, orphaned before hatching, embarks on an epic journey.

Alyte learns about the world through a series of encounters with other creatures, all of them trying to comprehend their place in a great chain of being. It’s a fairly terrifying adventure: He continually learns that eating or being eaten is part of everyday life, and that dying is “the natural order of things.” In the opening pages, his father has a bloody, fatal encounter while crossing a road but is able to drag himself into the water before he dies. His first friend, an exuberant salmon on her way upstream to lay eggs, expires after accomplishing her mission. Plonk, a friendly baby ibex, is carried off by an eagle and fed to its eaglets in front of Alyte. “Life doesn’t want me,” he laments at one point. But after a peaceful night cuddling with another toad, Alyte becomes father to a cluster of eggs that he must carry to the safety of a pond. Moreau explores the boundaries between water and air, life and death, nature and “lethalyte,” or “death incarnate,” represented by the road where Alyte’s father was crushed. The clean, dramatic illustrations range from full-page depictions of water, land, and forest to an appealing, though not quite peaceable, kingdom of fish, birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and trees, all engaged in the business of living and opposing the enemy lethalyte.

A compelling, earnest, and visually impressive animal allegory.