In the middle of the night, Sylvie the cat wakes up her owner. She pesters him to follow her, to go outside. “It’s coming,” she says. Outside, his world is in shadow. The boy discovers the night world for the first time. All the familiar plants look different, animals he’s never seen are everywhere. They are anticipating the arrival of something special. Looking to the sky, a glow forms. It increases, and colors start to develop until everything is light and bright with the sun’s morning rays.
In the author’s note, Mordecai Gerstein describes waking up in the middle of the night at the age of four and seeing a foreign place where his backyard should be—it was the night world. In this book, he has created a foreign and wondrous night world on the page, filled with shapes and shadows. In grays and black, Gerstein fills each page with nighttime life. The sunrise is an explosion of color. Gerstein says in his note that he thinks watching a sunrise is like “watching the creation of the world,” and he captures that feeling in the pages.
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