Dawn
Watch the World Awaken
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
With gorgeous artwork and a spare text, an award-winning picture-book creator gently celebrates the natural world through the lens of a sunrise. As the sun slowly rises, many things happen in a small window of time. The world comes alive with the actions of animals, plants, clouds, and sky. A deer drinks, an owl wakes, a dandelion shimmers in the light. A ladybug climbs, a fish jumps, birds call in a chorus. Geese fly away in formation. A flower blooms. Beautifully illustrated with glowing imagery and written with a charming simplicity holding appeal for new readers, Marc Martin’s ode to the slow-blooming beauty of a sunrise and the life that unfolds in its radiance narrows the lens to show the wonder of time passing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martin (A Stone Is a Story) employs delicate, luminous watercolor, pencil, and digital panels, captioning them with simple words, to limn quiet moments of drama in the natural world. The sun rises on an opening page, turning a pond's surroundings rusty gold as a fish jumps: "Dawn." A page later, a spiderweb gleams with diamond droplets: "dew." And a spotted fawn at the water's edge bends down to drink—"deer"—until it perks up its ears at a "sound"—and "spring"s away, leaving only ripples in the water and a sense of "still." Warm sunlight pervades most scenes (leaves are lit from the back, splashes of water catch the sun's rays), while tight, often creaturely close-ups give a sense of intimacy. As the sun appears over the trees, a single sunray is seen interacting with water ("glint"), light emerges from behind spruces ("glimmer"), an image of the sky appears in the pond ("reflection"), and, in a mesmerizing panel, the water's surface holds melting, shifting areas of color ("shimmer"). It's a contemplative work that captures the power of close observation, showing how individual panels and single, well-chosen words can sum up a place's feeling. Ages 4–8.
