Moonday by Adam Rex (review)

On a night when "the moon hung full and low and touched the tips of the trees," the unnamed narrator (a little girl with a blue jacket and brown pigtails) falls asleep on a car trip home, only to wake up the next morning to find the moon hovering in her backyard. The sun never comes up that day, leading to a town full of dazed and sleepy neighbors. The narrator and her family soon find that having the moon in their backyard is more trouble than it's worth, flooding the backyard when it brings the tide in and causing all the neighborhood dogs to coming howling, so they go for another drive, taking the moon in the window, and tell it to stay at the top of the hill. This fantasy interlude is perfect for a bedtime story, with mood more important than logic, and the narration is appropriately ethereal and evocative ("I looked through my heavy lashes, through the window, through lean trees to see my blue moon staring back at me"). The sometimes-rhyming text is lavish in its simplicity, and Rex's paintings hit the same tone with their impressionistic brushwork and fine attention to detail. Interior scenes are rich with warm colors, which are particularly cozy when they're juxtaposed against the ink-black background with white text, while outdoor scenes center the bright moon, using contrast and temporality to heighten the book's mysticism, like a scene in which the narrator is shown in multiple places on the surface of the moon at once to suggest her initial exploration of the moon's landing. Henkes' Kitten's First Full Moon (BCCB 3/04) might be a more concrete lunar nighttime selection, but the approach here is attractive, and kids will enjoy falling asleep to this imaginative fantasy.