Nightsong

PreS-Gr 3–Following up her charming book, Tiny Wonders, Han’s latest uses a spare palette for her delicate hand-drawn illustrations of more tiny wonders—the noises, hisses, clicks, and animal chatter that fill a night—and she accomplishes this with humor. In the first black-and-white scene, a cookie goes “Crunch!” and a teapot pours with a “Clitter Clatter” of its lid, but the human sound is “Blah blah.” Readers are squarely in young Lewis’s world, where color is used to make orange windblown curtains “Whoosh” and the birds outside “chirp.” A yellow car’s horn goes “honk!” in gold lettering, and a bicycle bell emits a “ding-ding!” because his story begins in the city. But the bus Lewis rides toward home gets a flat tire on a country road and he, initially bored, begins to explore. “The more he listens the more he hears. And the more he wants to see.” Han creates an arresting nightscape of owls hooting, critters scurrying, bugs buzzing, and a particularly idyllic scene when Lewis gives himself over to chasing fireflies. The beep of a working bus alerts him to the end of this foray, which lives in his head beyond the moment. Like Jashar Awan, this creator understands the child’s-eye perspective of events, or perhaps the child’s-ear? This will be a story-hour favorite, with every child joining in on the sounds of the night as well as the names of the sources for those sounds.