When Barack Obama prophesied that his election would mark "the
moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet
began to heal," people sniggered. What a claim! Did the man
think he could command the tides? Yet perhaps Mr. Obama knew
something the scoffers didn't. For as his half-sister suggests
in a bizarre new picture book, it is not the president but his
mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who directs the movement of the
waters from the surface of the moon. "Ladder to the Moon"
(Candlewick, 42 pages, $16.99) imagines Ms. Dunham as a
supernatural being, "full, soft, and curious," who "would send
tides to nourish [seeds] and weave a net of love around us all."
This cloying hymn of praise emerges from the pen of Maya
Soetoro-Ng, who, like many women, developed a new appreciation
for her mother when she herself had a child. To convey to her
own daughters the late Ms. Dunham's apparently boundless
compassion, Ms. Soetoro-Ng indulges in the worst kind of
pretentious gassiness. In the story, to the degree t