Light Speaks

by Christine Layton, Luciana Navarro Powell (Illustrator)

Overview

Spare, lovely text and gorgeous, color-saturated illustrations make a compelling presentation.

An enchanting picture book about the joyful, mysterious, awe-inspiring messages of light, whether emanating from a firefly or the sun, fireworks or the Big Bang, boats at sea or a bolt of lightning, a movie projector or a rainbow. Luciana Navarro Powell’s illustrations follow a group of kids through a magical day and evening in a seacoast town, while Christine Layton’s lyrical text explores the natural history of light. Backmatter provides further adventures in the science of light.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780884489245
Publisher:	Tilbury House Publishers
Publication date:	04/18/2023
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	687,247
Product dimensions:	10.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Christine Layton has been a teacher for over thirteen years and uses her early childhood literacy experience to create engaging nonfiction for developing readers. Her work has appeared in magazines, games, and assessments.

Luciana Navarro Powell has created art since childhood and became a full-time illustrator in 2001. She moved from watercolor and acrylic paints to the digital brush—loving the freedom and the possibilities of experimentation with textures—and then to mixed media, incorporating photographs and scanned objects with traditional techniques in a digital melting pot. The colors, vibrancy, and warmth of her native Brazil infuse her work with a sunny optimism, humor, and warm human-animal-landscape interactions. As an immigrant, she makes sure that kids can see themselves in her art.

Editorial Reviews

2023-02-08
An homage to light.

This sparklingly illustrated picture book consists of spare, poetic verse exploring the properties of light; however, it’s often too impenetrable for easy understanding (“light laughs in code, / signals in signs…”). Luckily, the book concludes with two pages of scientific context for some of the more cryptic phrases. For instance, Layton explains that the statement “Light tells the space between stars. / It echoes off planets and moons” means that we can see planets and moons—which do not generate their own light—in the night sky because light reflects off them from stars. While the idea of using poetry to celebrate light is an intriguing one, the abstruse verse and in-depth scientific explanations seem geared toward an older audience than the illustrations. The images are the stars of the show, making rich use of color to convey the idea of a shimmering universe. They offer some grounding to the esoteric narrative and present their own secondary storyline in which brown-skinned children (including one wheelchair user) observe light all around them as they shine flashlights at each other, cower from lightning during a storm, and gleefully capture fireflies. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Though the text is less than illuminating, the gorgeous visuals help shed light on the topic. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Kirkus Reviews