Night/Day: A Book of Eye-Catching Opposites

Herv Tullet, art director for more than 10 years and illustrator for the New Yorker, has produced a fascinating celebration of composition and color with Night and Day: A Book of Eye-Catching Opposites. Light converts to the shadow of a silhouette, order moves to disorder, and everything vanishes to nothing, in impossibly clever, purely visual ways. The transformations from one concept to another happen via a die-cut hole in the center of each spread that reveals a component of the next page. "Slow" (illustrated as a snail moving up a hill) accelerates to "fast" when the spiraled snail shell turns out to be a racecar wheel on the next page. A pure white page shouts "clean" while the "dirty" page that follows explodes with multicolored paint, including fingerprints. Most of the opposite concepts are fairly straightforward--"little/big," "inside/outside," "full/empty," "intact/broken"--but other comparisons such as "foot/hand," "boat/airplane," "daddy/mommy" are more contrasting than opposite in nature. This aspect of the book is interesting in itself, as the bold, ultramodern illustrations challenge the reader to think about why things are or are not true opposites, and how concepts thought to be opposite often share components. This unusual book is a visual, conceptual delight that is every bit as compelling for adults as it is for young children. (All ages) --Karin Snelson