Dawn: Watch the World Awaken

by Marc Martin, Marc Martin (Illustrator)

Overview

With gorgeous artwork and a spare text, an award-winning picture-book creator gently celebrates the natural world through the lens of a sunrise.

As the sun slowly rises, many things happen in a small window of time. The world comes alive with the actions of animals, plants, clouds, and sky. A deer drinks, an owl wakes, a dandelion shimmers in the light. A ladybug climbs, a fish jumps, birds call in a chorus. Geese fly away in formation. A flower blooms. Beautifully illustrated with glowing imagery and written with a charming simplicity holding appeal for new readers, Marc Martin’s ode to the slow-blooming beauty of a sunrise and the life that unfolds in its radiance narrows the lens to show the wonder of time passing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536232400
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	07/29/2025
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	10.25(w) x 11.69(h) x 0.43(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Marc Martin is an award-winning artist, illustrator, and author. He is the creator of many children’s books, including Masters of Disguise: Camouflaging Creatures and Magnificent Mimics; A Forest; and Everything and Everywhere. His books A River and We Are Starlings were both named best illustrated children’s books of the year by the New York Times. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Editorial Reviews

The book is a testament to Martin’s immense artistic talents. Truly stunning.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Martin (A Stone Is a Story) employs delicate, luminous watercolor, pencil, and digital panels, captioning them with simple words, to limn quiet moments of drama in the natural world. . . .A contemplative work that captures the power of close observation, showing how individual panels and single, well-chosen words can sum up a place's feeling.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Enchanting, digitally enhanced watercolors recreate the diffused light of an early morning on a lake and depict the quiet busyness of flora and fauna at this time of day. . . . The deceptive simplicity allows children to fill in the gaps by coming up with their own story.
—Booklist

From the Publisher

★ 2025-04-04
A sunrise awakens life on a lake.

As dawn breaks, the sun slowly rises on a lake where the flora and fauna stir. Creatures forage, make sounds, and move. Plants bend in the breeze and bloom. Martin conveys all this through the sparest of text—on each page, just a word or two focuses the eye on his lush, earthy illustrations. In one sequence, the worddeer is paired with an image of the animal lapping from the lake. On the following page, the wordssound andspring follow; the accompanying illustrations show the deer staring at readers and then fleeing, with only its hindquarters visible in this image. The third page depicts ripples in the water (“still”)—the sole sign that the deer was ever here. Other spreads stand alone; the wordconceal is paired with an illustration of an owl camouflaged by a tree, whilereveal shows the same owl no longer hidden, its yellow eyes wide open. Martin includes alliterative sequences, such as one involving a fish making a meal out of a fly. Portraits of insects abound, from butterflies to beetles. Rhymes evoke the quality of light on water: “glint / glimmer,” “reflection / shimmer.” Less a story and more a series of illustrations paired with poetic text, the book is a testament to Martin’s immense artistic talents.

Truly stunning.(Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews