This “song about the starry dark” begins with a young girl arriving home in the evening. The spare, cumulative story builds: “In the house burns a light. / In that light rests a bed.” On the bed is a book, and through the pages of the story the girl embarks on a journey of the imagination, soaring with a bird through the night sky before she returns to the warmth and comfort of home. Striking black-and-white scratchboard illustrations are punctuated by judicious washes of gold that radiate warmth. These form both a backdrop for and a complement to the lyrical text, which resonates with sounds and images to savor in a comforting yet surprising journey toward day’s end. (Ages 2–5)

A spare, patterned text and glowing pictures explore the origins of light that make a house a home in this bedtime book for young children. Naming nighttime things that are both comforting and intriguing to preschoolers—a key, a bed, the moon—this timeless book illuminates a reassuring order to the universe.