From Morning to Night

December 15, 2017
This French import uses simple techniques to encourage children to recognize familiar shapes in unusual places. Each spread consists of a pair of illustrations, the first one a common object, the second one the same elements reoriented to represent a different object. The color palette of warm orange and blue is skillfully used to enhance the differences between the two images. A simple bowl and spoon, captioned "a morning meal" is transformed into "a magic mushroom" by means of inverting the speckled bowl and broadening the blue spoon to make it a blue stalk. An orange fruit becomes a planet when a simple orange sphere changes to blue and the blue stem becomes a tiny orange star. Similarly, an orange segment morphs into a distant planet's orbiting moon, and a gift becomes a music box--from "a surprise" to "a song." A simple horizontal line spanning the spread changes from "a path" sprinkled with blue dots recalling snowflakes to "the night sky" with a constellation of orange stars. Some of the pairs offer contrasting emotional perceptions: "disappointment"--an empty chest--becomes "delight"--a letter in an envelope. In the final illustration, lines of text in a book ("a story read") become the striped sheets of a pair of twin beds ("time for bed"). A concept book with a mind-expanding perspective. (Picture book. 3-6)

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