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Summary
Summary
Count the nighttime lights on a train, a helicopter, a fire truck, and seven more vehicles in this bold picture book with die-cut surprises.
1 light, shining bright? A train!
7 lights, flashing red and white? A fire truck!
And so on all the way to ten lights. Part guessing game, part counting book, NIGHT LIGHT is a boldly imagined book for the preschool child who loves cars, trucks, and anything that goes. With die-cuts on every other page, this rhyming story features vehicles and counting, combining a high interest preschool subject with important preschool concepts.
Author Notes
Nicholas Blechman is an internationally recognized illustrator, designer, and art director. His award winning illustrations have appeared in GQ, TRAVEL + LEISURE, WIRED, and THE NEW YORKER. He has taught design at School of Visual Arts and illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is currently the art director of THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. NIGHT LIGHT is his debut children's book. Nicholas lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and their son.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Blechman's graphic design background may account for his debut's disciplined focus and polished execution. It's a counting book about big vehicles-a winning combination right there-with an extra, innovative twist. He invites readers to identify the vehicles with a turn-the-page guessing game. First, spreads of pure black show only the vehicles' distinctive signature of lights. "1 light, shining bright?" reads the first black spread, a small, die-cut circle on the right side creating a single white dot. A page turn uncovers the answer: "train." The bold, crisp-edged, streamlined engine speeds toward viewers, its white headlamp front and center. "2 lights, hovering in flight?" the next jet-black spread asks, with two die-cut dots revealing tiny green and red lights. This time, it's a helicopter, piloted by a roundheaded man resembling a Lego or Playmobil figurine. The typeface contributes to the light theme, too-made up of dots, it mimics the blinking displays of highway warning signs. The lights on the vehicles go up to 10, but young vehicle fans will want to reread (and "replay") this book many more times than that. Ages 3-5. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
With a graphic design scheme apparently inspired by Lite-Brite, this hybrid counting book-bedtime story asks readers to guess the source of illumination poking through die-cut black pages. The guessing game ("1 light, shining bright?") starts with a single, lunar-like circle that a page turn reveals to be a headlight on a train. Vehicle-obsessed readers will enjoy how every question -- "2 lights, hovering in flight?" "7 lights, flashing red and white?" -- leads to a helicopter or fire truck or taxicab or snowplow, all pleasingly rendered in geometric digital illustrations. And the die cuts are strategically placed to do double duty: for instance, after a page turn, the three lights on a taxi turn into the open mouths of folks trying to hail it. As soon as we get to ten, it's back to one for the finale -- one boy, one night-light, one bed, and a whole lot of toy trucks and trains and such strewn about the room, fueling his imagination. christine m. heppermann (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Here's a cleverly designed book that celebrates the fun of counting, the joy of rhyme, the excitement of imagination, and vehicles. On black pages with die cuts of various numbers and sizes emitting patches of light, a question is posed. Turn the page and surprise! Those die cuts are encircling the lights on a familiar vehicle presented as a simple geometric shape with a young boy as the driver of each of them. The reverse cuts add something new to the spread. For instance, the answer to the first question, Light Shining Bright?, is a train's headlight. Cleverly, that same circle is now set against the previous black page, and it's the opening to a tunnel. The book starts with 1 cutout, and continues through 10, and ends at 1. The final double-page spread shows a night-light in a muted room filled with toy versions of the vehicles on the previous pages, the child now in bed, reading this book. Blechman has created an interactive offering with lots of possibilities and a perfect ending.--Ching, Edie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SPRING is for busting out and rediscovering the world, so these four picture books come along just in time to help kids do some exploring - from the backyard to overseas to underseas to outer space - and they all let the visuals lead the charge. The most adventurous of the bunch is "A Long Way Away," by Frank Viva. It's a worthy follow-up to his inventive picture book debut, "Along a Long Road," a stylishly picturesque travelogue about a bicycle trip on a meandering yellow path that eventually circles around to the front of the book for a never-ending tale. Viva further expands the possibilities of good old ink-and-paper-on-a-spine with "A Long Way Away," which can be read from front to back or back to front, each direction telling a slightly different story about a little octopus/alien on a labyrinthine journey, and its many friendly encounters along the way. When read from the front, the octo-alien leaves its family on a distant planet and floats downward, weaving through an atmosphere of playful moons, astro-dogs, airplanes and sky divers. Reaching Earth, it splashes into the ocean and descends past exotic fishes, a nifty retro submarine and a puzzled deepsea diver - finally coming to rest and nodding off on a coral reef. In the back-to-front version, the character starts on the reef, awakens and travels upward toward its home planet and the embrace of its family. As the wiggly octo-alien - equally agile in deep water and deep space - follows its winding path from one end of the book to the other, short, poetic text embellishes the action and interactions. Illustrated with the joyous aesthetic of a Matisse cut-paper collage, the story works gracefully both ways, and children will love following the character as it ventures away from home in one version, then back to the security of its family in the other. "A Long Way Away" delivers an exciting out-and-back adventure while proving there's still room for invention in the nondigital book format. In a sequel to her popular alphabet book "Backseat A-B-See," Maria van Lieshout brings us "Flight 1-2-3," a counting book and primer about airports, one of those environments that can be frighteningly chaotic to children. The book uses standardized airport signage to acquaint the reader with everything from luggage carts to restrooms, counting them from one to 10 along the way. The iconic signs appear within a simple, visual narrative about a family making their way through an airport. The family members, though drawn in the same marshmallow-limbed graphic style as the signage humanoids, are given enough flair to be expressive and entertaining. They check in, dispose of prohibited items (a baseball bat conveniently plays the role of a weapon), wait for the restroom, get refreshments and board the plane. By takeoff, we've reached No. 10, so the book switches to a few metric conversion lessons as the plane crosses the globe. In a refreshing counterpoint to the factual information and geometric visuals, the journey ends with the family welcomed and hugged by loved ones. For an educational way to introduce children to the big world of air travel, this is just the ticket. There are probably as many tricks to teaching numbers as there are numbers, and "Night Light," by Nicholas Blechman, uses three (Three!) of them in concert. First, the vehicle for his counting book is vehicles, appealing to the universal attraction that children, especially boys, exhibit for all things wheely. (I think it's primal, as demonstrated by my nephew's first words: "dubba dekka buth.") Second, Blechman, who is the art director of the Book Review, has turned counting into a guessing game - learning camouflaged as play. Third, he introduces each number in short, rhyming text alongside a corresponding number of small circles on a field of black. It's as simple as counting dots but more engaging because the dots are actually die-cut holes, so the reader gets to guess what the holes will reveal when the page is turned. For example, the number 7 is introduced with seven holes; turning the page unveils a fire truck with two headlights and five flashing lights. "Night Light" is illustrated in blocky shapes using digital art, but it ends on a warm note, showing a child's room at night with the cast of vehicles reappearing all willy-nilly around the room and, of course, a night light glowing in the corner. "Inside Outside," a wordless picture book by Lizi Boyd, demonstrates that exploration is as much about depth as distance, and that, with an observant eye and inquisitive mind, you can find a world of inspiration in your own backyard, which is exactly what the sole character does. In scenes alternating between inside a house and just outside it, we see a boy experience nature outdoors and then celebrate it indoors. Everything in his house - from pets to paintings, posters to projects - is inspired by the natural world. It's quickly clear that to this boy, indoors is a great place to reflect on nature, but outdoors - well, that's where it's at. The shifts between indoors and out span the seasons, so winter is a time for making snowmen and then painting pictures of them indoors; spring is for flying kites outdoors and starting seedlings indoors; summer is for tending the garden outdoors and making a toy sailboat indoors; and fall is for raking leaves outdoors and then staging a show with owl puppets. The line between indoors and out is further blurred by die-cut windows in the house, so even when we're inside we can watch a bird building a nest outdoors, and when we're outdoors we can see a shelf of nature books waiting for us indoors. For all of its layering and interconnections, the book has a meditative quality. The minimalist illustrations, painted with a limited palette on humble kraft paper, have the orderly aesthetic of traditional Japanese prints. Like the best wordless picture books, "Inside Outside" exercises a child's natural ability to decipher visuals; it's rich with implied associations, tertiary stories and small details to be unearthed. book, like nature, reveals more with each study, and just as the boy doesn't have to go beyond his own backyard to be enchanted, you don't have to go beyond "Inside Outside" to discover how much a picture book can do. Tom Lichtenheld's most recent books are "Steam Train, Dream Train," written by Sherri Duskey Rinker, and "Sing," with lyrics by Joe Raposo.
School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 1-Count the lights-1, 2, 3.. Round and square openings on alternating black spreads highlight the numbers from 1 to 10 and back again. Brief text challenges readers to infer what lies on the following full-color spread, and a page turn will delight fans of motor vehicles and heavy equipment. A snowplow pushes through heavy snow as snowmen fish through holes in an icy pond and open chimneys smoke in the distance, a bright yellow school bus passes elephants in a zoo, and a vibrant red fire truck pours water on a chef's flaming skillet. Visual perspective emphasizes size and distance with a train moving along tracks from a distant tunnel or a helicopter flying amid birds above the city below. The vehicles roll past in uncluttered graphic designs and bold colors. Counting, shapes, and patterns end in a child's bedroom that holds toy images of all the vehicles and a very special single beacon for a small child. his night-light. An attractive, eye-catching find for all libraries.-Mary Elam, Learning Media Services, Plano ISD, TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
This urban-themed picture book makes ingenious use of simple die-cut circles of different sizes on each page to reveal the lights of various vehicles on the following page. A train, helicopter, taxicab, tugboat, street sweeper, fire truck and other vehicles guaranteed to pique the interest of every little boy (and some girls) are rendered in a bold, stylized design using flat, vibrant colors. The book's design has a fun, retro feel, although beginning readers may find the dot-matrix type challenging. The format encourages creative guesswork--which vehicle has two white, one red and one green light? Turn the page and seea tugboat, of course! The title makes a clever connection between the various lights of the city at night, which are illustrated on every page, and the reassuring night light in the little boy's bedroom on the last page, where he sits in his truck-shaped bed, surrounded by toy versions of the vehicles in the book, readingthis book. This is a first foray into children's-book design by renowned New York Times designer and illustrator Blechman, sweetly dedicated to his young son. A stylish and original take on the time-honored die-cut counting book. (Picture book. 2-5)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
