At night

Toddler-PreS--A toddler introduction to the shrouded realm of what goes on after dark. Both urban and forested locations disclose an assortment of nighttime activity. Mail carriers and bakers are busy before dawn. Owls and bats swoop over a pond populated with frogs and fish. The text provides detailed information without overwhelming youngsters. Engaging questions encourage adult readers to make this an active reading experience: "What noise do owls make?" Perera's alluring gouache and pencil illustrations will captivate young ones. Objects are well spaced, so the layout feels full but not busy. Buildings, wildlife, and foliage are depicted with distinction, making this book a favorable tool to teach object identification. A small format issue could momentarily derail adult readers: Some pages feature an awkward placement of text segments, resulting in the text being read out of sequence. The intended audience will not be thwarted, however. VERDICT A gratifying, topical hornbook for toddlers and early preschoolers.--Richelle Rose, Kenton County P.L., KY

Get an insider's look at nocturnal life in this die-cut board book. Touching briefly on various facets of human and animal nightlife, pages range from a farmer milking cows "before sunrise" while the rooster cock-a-doodle-doos to more natural settings, such as wetlands with bats hunting and frogs singing. There's plenty to see on the busy pages--perhaps too much. Besides the primary text of accurate but generic statements about night, small bubbles filled with questions such as "What noise do frogs make?" or small factoids informing readers that "Frogs like to sing at night" hover arbitrarily about the page. With the different typefaces and text formats, pages lack visual focus, especially when print is sprinkled among the many mildly anthropomorphized animals and hectic backgrounds. Some die cuts are equally strained. While the largest center die cut effectively creates the illusion of a layered night sky, the fiddly, teeny die cuts sporadically placed across the page are too small to show much clearly and are sometimes misaligned from the picture underneath. Semirealistic illustrations with a Little Golden Book vibe are competent and capture the night environs reasonably well, and the extra-thick cardboard pages seem ready for tough toddler handling. Another book in the series, What Can You See? On the Farm, shares the same whimsical animals and chaotic format. Adequate if overly busy. (Board book. 2-4 ) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.