In the beguiling On a Summer Night, Deborah Hopkinson (Carter Reads the Newspaper) and Kenard Pak (On the Horizon illustrator) eloquently showcase the hushed, magical wonder of a hot summer night.
A child wakes on a night so warm that "even the crickets think it's too hot to sing." The child walks through the house and explores the yard in moonlit shadows. Hopkins sets the story in present tense, with a second-person voice asking: "What has woken you?" As the child explores inside and outside the home, the world comes alive. The cat sleeping on the table wakes and follows the protagonist, the dog across the street starts barking, and one cloud sways in the sky. Separately, the child and cat take in the wonder of it all: "You breathe in the night, slow and quiet." When all settles, the child lifts the cat and heads back to bed.
Hopkinson builds a cumulative tale with a series of questions about who wakes each thing: Who woke the cat? "Was it you?" This is followed by the introduction of the dog: "Who has woken him? Was it the cat? Was it you?" The story, tantalizingly, provides no answers. Hopkinson's text is evocative. She fills the book with bustling verbs, descriptive phrasing, vivid figurative language, and pleasing alliteration. Pak uses shadowy shades of plum, pine green, and slate to illustrate the brown-skinned child in a neighborhood by a body of water. Intentionally off-kilter compositions, as well as interstitial spreads with a moving band of growing light, accentuate the mystery of the night and its quiet surprises. --Julie Danielson, reviewer and copyeditor