Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228422 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Released on: 2007-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 32 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781596430884
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From School Library Journal
PreSchool-K–As the day comes to an end, Mother Sky fills a tub with falling stars and calls, 'Bath time for Little Night!' But the child wants to play and urges her mother to come and find her. Mother does, and Little Night is bathed in what appears to be a mixture of bubbles and clouds. When it is time to dress for bed, again Little Night runs off to hide. And again Mother Sky finds her, and dresses her in a white dress crocheted from clouds. The same thing happens when it is time to eat. Little Night is depicted with a milk-white mustache after drinking stars from the Milky Way. Finally, Mother Sky untangles Little Night's hair with a shiny comb, and the child is ready to continue her play, bouncing the moon high into the air! Full-bleed spreads with luminous and rich hues of evening sky–blues, reds, and pinks–are painted in flowing sweeps of color, which illuminate and animate the glorious text. They are juxtaposed with the dark earth tones of cherubic Little Night and Mother Sky, and the effect is dreamlike and peaceful. A treasure for bedtime, or anytime.–DeAnn Okamura, San Mateo County Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Mother Sky appears to be preparing a child, Little Night, for bedtime. The activities are familiar--the bath, the stalling, the snack--but in this fanciful tale, nighttime is really Little Night's playtime. Pura Belpre Award winner Morales has created a sumptuous feast of metaphors in her text: a bathtub filled with falling stars, a dress crocheted from clouds. The equally splendid illustrations effectively convey each of the images and heighten the comfort and serenity inspired by the text. The quietness is carefully balanced by rambunctious art, an amalgamation of shifting perspectives, pleasantly exaggerated forms, and rich jewel-tone colors and the characters are clearly defined and effectively placed in the sweeping forms that evoke the fantastical landscapes. The blues of the evening sky and the reds of the sunset blanket the double-page spreads, enveloping Little Night and her mother and making the metaphor entirely believable. Children will delight in Little Night's dreamy world and will want to read about her unique, yet still familiar, nighttime ritual again and again. Randall Enos
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

Wake up the night
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 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 The 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 taleisn '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.

A gorgeous, sweet story
A lovely story about a special little girl and her mommy, with gorgeous, peaceful illustrations. A perfect bedtime story.

GLOW in the dark!
It is common knowledge that Yuyi Morales is a color genius and a word magician, and with Little Night, she does it again. Yuyi's color palette is imaginative, unique and vibrant. Her colors are so deep. So sparkly. I am convinced they will glow in the dark if I were to turn off the light. I LOVE her combination of magenta and red with turquoise and purple.
her compositions are magical. My eye flows over the pages, dancing from one spread to the next.
Yuyi's text is lyrical and soothing, perfect for a bed-time story, yet the the STARS of this story are the characters. Mother Sky is warm, round, loving and nurturing. She's the type of mother I wish upon everyone.
Little Night is spirited, sweet and a mischievous. Their relationship is filled with emotion and tenderness.
I recommend Little Night to everyone. It's just the soothing, loving story kids need to fall into a peaceful sleep under the stars-Venus on the east, Maercury on the west, and Jupiter above!