Long Night Moon

by Cynthia Rylant, Mark Siegel (Illustrator)

Overview

Have you ever stopped to consider what might be revealed in one spot over one year by twelve unique and exquisite full moons?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780689854262
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	12/01/2004
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	1,081,957
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Cynthia Rylant is the author of more than 100 books for young people, including the beloved Henry and Mudge, Annie and Snowball, Brownie & Pearl, Motor Mouse, and Mr. Putter & Tabby series. Her novel Missing May received the Newbery Medal. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Siegel is the author and illustrator of several award-winning picture books and graphic novels, including Tiny Dancer, To Dance, Moving House, and Sailor Twain. His latest project is the collaborative graphic novel series 5 Worlds, an epic science fiction story for young readers. In addition to writing and illustrating, Mark is also the founder and creative and editorial director of First Second Books, Macmillan’s graphic novel house. The Siegels live in Tarrytown, New York. Visit Mark at MarkSiegelBooks.com.

Editorial Reviews

Rylant's (When I Was Young in the Mountains) lilting prose-poetry, with sometimes only a few words per page, introduces the traditional Native American name for each month's full moon: "In April/ the Sprouting Grass Moon brings/ all wanderers back home./ Baby birds love this moon./ It lights their tiny heads." In a dramatic departure from his boisterous Seadogs, Siegel uses charcoal, pencil and pastels in full-bleed spreads that present the full moon as at times haunting, and at other times a large, joyful night-lamp, showering fields and forest in transluscent light. Siegel introduces human characters on the half-title page (a mother and child), seen only in silhouette. The spreads follow a single rural landscape around 360 degrees of the horizon, with the moon rising at a different compass point every month. June's Strawberry Moon bathes the landscape in a soft pink halo, August's Harvest Moon in lavender. The garden of a small house gives way to an overgrown pasture, a plowed field, a barn and a silo and, in December, back to the garden again. There, the same mother who stood outside with her baby admiring January's Stormy Moon stands there again, at year's end, looking at December's Long Night Moon, her baby visibly larger. Like a lullaby, this album of full moons offers gentle comfort at bedtime. Ages 3-6. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Rylant takes the evocative trope of the First Peoples' naming of the full moons of the year and turns it into a quiet meditation on time and nature. Siegel is just in tune with her words, his charcoal, pencil and pastel drawings fill the pages with shadows, each lit by a brilliant full moon. He pans around a rural setting: a gazebo with a mother and child, a house with a single bright window, huge old trees, fields, fence, road. Month by month, readers see moonlight picking out a particular thing: skunks' white stripes or the tips of new grasses. These lovely images echo Rylant's gentle prose: "In April / the Sprouting Grass Moon brings / all wanderers back home. / Baby birds love this moon. / It lights their tiny heads." In each spread, while Siegel evokes landscape and fauna in deep blues, grays, black and brown, the moon looms with an unearthly glow. The Long Night Moon is December's: "The faithful moon. / This one is your friend," whispers the mother into the hair of her babe, as they stand in the gazebo wrapped in woolies and stars once again. (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews