Flashlight Night

Three children get ready to spend the night in a tree house with a blanket roll and a stack of books. An older boy with brown skin carries a flashlight that slices through the darkness, "past old post and rail/ along a long-forgotten trail." In scribble-textured pencil drawings, Koehler (This Book Is Not About Dragons) pictures scenes of make-believe unfolding within the flashlight's beam. The boy and his companions--a girl his age and a younger boy in footie pajamas, both white--explore a tomb, battle a threatening pirate aboard his ship, then vanquish a giant squid. In the darkness beyond the flashlight's glare, readers can see the real landscape that provides the settings for the fantasy play: the tomb is under the backyard deck, and the pirate ship is in the pool. The final page reveals another source of the group's swashbuckling adventures: the books the three are reading together. Newcomer Esenwine's balladic verse and Koehler's sturdily drafted pencil drawings don't just lobby for children to read--they show how readers play. Ages 4-8. Illustrator's agent: Tracey Adams, Adams Literary. (Sept.)

PreS-Gr 2--There's something almost magical about flashlights. Esenwine's poem captures this quality as three children (one brown-skinned and two white) explore a backyard, deck, basement, and tree house under the beam of their torch. The verse is incantatory, summoning jungle beasts, Egyptian tombs, pirate ships, and the like. Koehler's digitally colored pencil drawings cleverly depict what's really in the kids' surroundings while also showing what they are imagining: the edge of an upended vase in the ray of light is revealed to be a part of a baseball in the dark, a bone is actually a knotted rope, the ocean is really the above-ground pool, and so on. VERDICT This is a simple idea that's engagingly executed and would be an excellent, atmospheric read for sleepovers or backyard campouts. A good choice for most collections.--Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Library, NY