Barbara Fanson for Readers’ Favorite
The dark purple and burgundy colors fill the page with stylized illustrations to attract readers to Night Critters Play while the rhyming story will fill them with a sense of wonder. The pages are filled with an abundance of descriptive words like surge, flit, glow, and slide, crawl, leap, flip, and soar.
What a wonderful but subtle way to expand a child’s vocabulary! Author Esseboe Kwami Nyamidie has written an amazing story of creatures that creep during the night that will have children wanting to stay up late one night just to see for themselves. Teachers will refer to this book for its descriptive verbs but also for illustration techniques. Children will learn about animals, insects, and other critters that go bump in the night.
Illustrator Pamela B. Christiansen supplies us with full-page, stylized artwork that will have children looking for the animal or insect’s image amongst leaves and grasses. I love the stylized illustrations in the book with their dark “evening” colors. Beautiful elegance awaits as you turn each page. I loved how some words are colored, enlarged, and meant to pop out of the story to add a splash of color to the text.
Author Esseboe Kwami Nyamidie paints a picture with his descriptive and rhyming text that children—and parents—will enjoy reading. I think every school and public library should have Night Critters Play on the shelf for its descriptive poem and unusual illustration style.