Lights at Night

K-Gr 3–Two children and their parents travel through dusk and night and seasons observing lights, accompanied by a fox and her kits in the background. Beginning with a spring storm as the family drives home, “Street lamps turn on, one, two, three. Red light, green light, yellow light, red.” The power goes out as the children go to bed. A summer camping trip shows firelight and fireworks at a lake. Fall brings golden afternoons and nights with football. Then winter’s aurora borealis shimmers as “circles under the dancers in the sky” appear. The flowing text begins and ends with simple sentences that blossom then retreat from more descriptive paragraphs. The narrative begins and ends at night with the siblings at home and the foxes outside. The human and fox families’ parallel lives are drawn in lush, darkly colored pages, with most spreads in an impressionistic style. Lights for various holidays appear in the decorations of homes. Near the end of the story, fox images are outlined in the night sky. The end pages have a fox nightlight at the front and a light switch with glowing stickers at the back. The family’s skin and hair color—dark hair, tan skin—may imply they are Metís, like the author, but many different ethnicities would find themselves reflected in the pages of this book.