Moses Goes to the Circus - Hardcover

Isaac Millman is the author and illustrator of two other books about Moses, Moses Goes to a Concert, which Booklist called “[a] breakthrough picture book,” and Moses Goes to School. He lives in New York City.

PreSchool-Grade 2-Moses, who is deaf, attends the Big Apple Circus's Circus of the Senses for vision- and hearing-impaired children with his family. Although the story is slight, the experience is rich: readers uninitiated to the deaf community are offered plenty of new concepts to process, including public entertainment adapted for the deaf, along with illustrated instructions for communicating in American Sign Language. Moses Goes to a Concert (1998) and Moses Goes to School (2000, both Farrar) involve deaf-school field trips. The family setting in Circus gives the affable child, already a joy to identify with, another facet in common with the book's hearing audience and allows for the introduction of Moses's baby sister, who is not deaf but who is signing before she can speak. Cheerful watercolor illustrations, almost exclusively on spreads, reflect the largeness of a circus and accommodate, without burdening the layout, the many boxes in which Moses models ASL. Millman successfully projects deafness as an aspect of a healthy, positive individual.
Liza Graybill, Worcester Public Library, MA
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