Night Light (published by Scholatic Canada) is a fun, engaging book that appeals to a variety of young ages. The images are bright and colourful, the concept is simple yet very clever, and there are machines! In my kids’ eyes, if there are machines the book is a chart-topping success!
Night Light is clever due to its use of cut-outs. The first page starts “1 Light, Shining Bright?”, on the opposite page, on a black background appears to be a white dot. In fact that white dot is a cut-out that is showing the 1 white headlight of an on coming train. As the reader of MANY MANY children’s books, I always applaud an author for introducing a creative twist!
Our two year old loves this book because of the machines: trains, helicopters, street sweeper, boat, fire truck and more. Our four year old loves this book because he can “read” it. He is in that delightful pre-reading stage which shows kids’ terrific memory abilities. There are minimal words in this book, he can read the numbers and figure out what is being said based on the pictures. He also really likes to stick his finger through the various cut-outs.
Night Light by Nicholas Blechman is a “read again” book in our house; I recommend adding it to any young child’s library.
