Polar Bear Night (SIGNED COPY)
by: Lauren Thompson / Stephen Savage

Hardcover. NY, Scholastic Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY BOTH AUTHOR & ILLUSTRATOR with a tiny sketch. Another graphically minimalist yet utterly effective picture book for the very young. "Snug inside her warm den, a polar bear cub wakes. Something in the moonlit stillness quietly beckons. What is it?" The tug of this gentle mystery will draw children into Thompson's simple bedtime story, and the hypnotic ebb and flow of her alliterative lines (on a night that's "keen and cold," little cub "sets out for the snow and sky and sea and ice") will keep children immersed as the young explorer encounters floating, dreaming sea creatures, and witnesses a meteor shower that further transforms the already exotic nighttime surroundings. As arresting as Thompson's language are Savage's powerful linocuts, which beautifully reference the textures and forms of Inuit stone carvings and evoke the arctic landscape in a few elemental colors per spread: glacial blues, grays, and sea greens; the pinks and lavenders of the aurora borealis.