Review of the Day: Little Night

Little Night by Yuyi Morales. Roaring Brook Press (A Neal Porter Book). $16.95.

You ever get so attached to an illustrator that they could be drawing stick figures on matchboxes and you’d still pay top dollar to look at ‘em? Yeah. So that’s basically my attitude towards Yuyi Morales. She could draw images for Pictionary and I’d be all gaga over them. I can’t help it. The woman has skills. I was wowed by her Pure Belpre Medal winning, “Just a Minute” and more than a tad impressed by the illustrations contributed to “Los Gatos Black on Halloween”. “Little Night,” however, is a very rare critter; a bedtime picture book I actually like. Don’t get me wrong. There are good bedtime stories out there in the world. I just happen to dislike a good 95% of them. They’re either too treacly or too icky-cutesy. They try too hard and end up too earnest, or their tone is off and they simply don’t read well to kids. “Little Night”, exhibits none of these flaws. It’s a tale as sweetly dark and tender-hearted as a warm hug on a summer night. The fact that it also happens to be beautiful to boot doesn’t hurt things any either.

“In the flowered city there is an endless mother, giving and magnificent like the sky.” These words come from Yuyi Morales’s dedication to her mother, but she could well be talking about the mother in this book. Nighttime is drawing near and Mother Night needs to get her daughter Little Night out of bed and ready. Her small child, however, has other plans in mind. If Mama wants her to take a bath in a tub full of falling stars she’ll need to play a little hide-and-seek by the rabbit holes first. And if Mama wants to dress Little Night in her bedtime gown crocheted from the clouds above, she may need to first peek inside the bats’ cave to find her giggling child. On and on they go, with Mama preparing and Little Night hiding until at last it's time for the child to take her moon and bounce it high into the air.

I made the mistake of reading another review of this book before writing my own. Usually I try to avoid doing this because I have this fear that I’ll somehow digest another person’s words into my subconscious and end up parroting things they’ve already said. It’s even worse, though, when someone comes up with a description of the book that you wish to high heaven you’d come up with. So with full credit going to Randall Enos of Booklist, one of the things I loved the most about Morales’s art, were her, “rich jewel-tone colors.” I mean, there’s just no better way to describe them. These colors seep over the pages with deep reds, purples, and indigo blues. With her backgrounds in place, the pure white of the stars pierces the gloom just like Little Night’s mischievous twinkling eyes. The exaggerated characters give the book a little extra added oomph too. I love how Mother Sky is this all expansive bell-shaped maternal figure. Her two braids curl delicately at their ends like the tip of a cat’s tail and her tiny hands weave Little Night’s hair into intricate braids, with three gleaming planets to hold it all in place.

In a way, you can read this book as a description of the way in which the sky changes in the evening. Falling stars and fading clouds at the start. Fireflies and the slow appearance of the Milky Way next. Finally the view of, “Venus on the east, Mercury on the west, and Jupiter above,” with a thick round moon to cap it all off at the end. So lovely. Kids will also enjoy this book when they find that Little Night isn’t just playing hide and go seek with her mother in these pages. She’s playing with the reader as well. You can usually spot her, though, since her tiny white eyes sparkle like little stars wherever it is that she goes.

All told, the current crop of children’s picture books the publishers are putting out there these days aren’t exactly o’erflowing with Hispanic characters. You can find them if you need to, but sometimes it’s nice to find a really high quality picture book containing characters that aren’t whitey white white. It’s nice too to see a book where the affection between the mother and the child feels genuine. I know “Runaway Bunny” has its fans, but books like that one never really convince me that the mother in the story feels anything aside from an almost violent possessiveness towards her child. “Little Night,” however, feels loving and warm. In short, perfect bedtime reading.

The obvious pairing with this book would have to be with Ana Juan’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous, “The Night Eater”. Duh. The two picture books were darn well made for one another. But while one is about the fellow who eats away the night to make way for the dawn, the other is about the night going through an, ironically enough, wake-up routine at the close of day. Searching for a proper bedtime tale isn’t a difficult task in and of itself. It’s nice, though, to find a book that is quite as touching, magical, and doggone adorable as this. Worth holding onto, tight.

Previously Reviewed By: BC Books.

Review of the Day: Midsummer Knight

Midsummer Knight by Gregory Rogers. A Neal Porter Book of
Roaring Brook Press. $16.95.

How can you resist a children’s picture book author/illustrator who repeatedly and continually makes William Shakespeare the world’s most reprehensible villain? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love me my Will. But to see him transformed time and time again into a Snidley Whiplash-ish figure? It’s funny, pure and simple. Having rocked the world with “The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard” a couple years ago, Aussie Gregory Rogers is back for more with the same cast of characters transposed into an entirely new setting. If wordless picture books are rare then sequels to popular wordless picture books must be even rarer. Thank goodness then that this one lives up to its predecessor.

When last seen, our hero the bear was garbed in a knight’s helm and cloak drifting merrily down a riverbank. We pick up where we left off before as the bear finds a secret entrance into an enchanted fairy realm. Once there he meets up with a young boy (a puckish fellow, if you will) and the two go off to meet the king and queen of the realm. Trouble is, the rulers appear to be a bit, how do you say, indisposed at the moment. A nasty villain with the clothing of a wasp and the facial features of a Shakespeare quickly disarms and captures the boy and the bear. Once imprisoned with the other former denizens of the castle, it’s up to our hero to find a way to overpower the baddies and save the day in the end.

Wordless cartooning isn’t as easy as you might expect. The nice thing about Gregory’s world is that he draws scenes that are both easy for a child to follow and yet convey a great deal of action and adventure without uttering a sound. Even Andy Runton’s, “Owly” books will slip up and insert an exclamation point or “Peep” here and there. Not Gregory. I’ve noticed too that his illustrations are remarkably deceptive. For all its cartooonish elements, there’s nothing one-dimensional about the artist’s style. Perspective is constantly shifting. At one point we get an aerial view of the evil Shakespeare fairy making a run out of the castle with a load of loot. In the next panel we’re onn the floor looking up at a pack of angry fairies mere seconds away from kicking the kablooey out of the malicious villain. The watercolors in this story are particularly good at conveying shadowy places and moonlit walks.

Of course, don’t expect a play on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with this book. The fairy setting is the beginning and the end of any and all Shakespearean references. This was kind of too bad. I saw hoping for maybe a sly allusion here and there. Maybe someone could disguise themselves with a donkeyhead. Maybe there could be a chase scene through a bower. One detail I did almost miss was in the very last picture in the book. The bear is walking happily away from the secret entrance into the fairy land. As he admires his new medal the moon shines down upon a ring of red mushrooms sitting just in front of the door. Anyone with a passing knowledge of lore will recognize this to be a fairy ring. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

I wonder, while reading this, just how this book will strike people who never read its predecessor. I mean, it kind of makes the assumption that you’ve met these people before. Why else would a bear be a hero? It would appear to be a little random unless you knew of his role in, “The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard.” That said, this book stands entirely on its own. Less constant panels of running and more plot-based, Gregory Rogers has given us an entirely charming story. Next time a parent comes up to me and demands Shakespeare-related materials for their four-year-old, I think I know exactly where I’m gonna steer them.

ALSO REVIEWED BY: The Excelsior File, who spent a great deal of time and energy detailing the predecessor to this book as well. Well done and worth a peek.