The Dark Is For considers darkness through the lens of its powers to calm, cool, comfort, encourage communal spirit, and arouse curiosity. It makes a marvelous antidote for any hesitance or fear a child may have about this essential complement to light.
Poetic wording soothingly invites us into the book's pages:
As the sun sinks down in the hot blue sky,
tree boughs shelter our burning skin.
Leaf shapes shiver on our bare arms.
Illustrations show us children contentedly sprawled on the ground and relaxing against an ancient tree trunk, bathed in shades of deep blue and lavender as the sun sinks toward the horizon. This quiet, inward energy leads to children discovering animal burrows and seeking hidden treasure: "The dark is for hiding." Then in the dusk we witness the magnificence of an owl's flight, which the children feel in their outspread arms: "The dark is for flying."
When the story reaches full dark, what vistas open!
Night peels back the curtain
so we can gaze into forever.
And the central message allows for dark itself to be of comfort: "Don't be afraid to let in the dark, to wrap yourself in night like a blanket." Here four people embrace in a circle of love and care. We're reminded that "When outside is dark, we make an inner light" by storytelling, remembering, and imagining.
Author Jane Kohuth, whose books have appeared on several best-of-the-year lists, and Caldecott Honor winner Cindy Derby, whose illustrations bring out night's sparkle and magic, have created a book that's more than a bed-time story. It's also medicine to heal any part of us that doesn't yet recognize the exquisite necessity of dark in our lives. Readers ages four to eight will be captivated, and so will their teachers and caregivers.
