The Books

Before You Were Born

by Nancy White Carlstrom
Illustrated by Linda Saport

One Potato Review

There’s a lot of God to get over, or to celebrate, here. You could also make a case this book is more naturally pitched to breathless new parents than the very young children they read to, still there’s finally no discounting the enormous peacefulness between these covers – both in saturated landscapes full of hills and stars and leaping, glowing fish, and the text which lingers in “faraway shadows” and “cactus bursting into bloom.” There’s a great grandmother here too who has woven a cap for the newborn out of moonbeams and silk and a lifetime’s worth of perspective. This book is like that sometimes. For baby dreams, she says.