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Leslie, Lindsay

Dusk Explorers

32 pp. | Page Street | June, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-1-62414-871-2 $17.99
(2) K-3 Illustrated by Ellen Rooney. A suburban neighborhood, nostalgically drawn, bids children to make the most of a summer evening. As twilight falls, a diverse cast of kids happily heeds the call to climb trees and look at worms; play leapfrog, hide-and-seek, tag, and kick-the-can; and whisper secrets and catch fireflies together. Leslie has a keen sense of how children play: they "love to run at lightning-fast speeds to a cricket's crick, crick, crick and dodge a street lamp's gradual glow to keep from being captured," and they enjoy giving toads "funny matching names like Bubba, Bubbette, and Bubbarina." Pairing seamlessly with the vivid, lyrical text are Rooney's bold mixed-media collage illustrations, which use light and dark and swaths of color to wonderful effect. On the title page, for starters, a sinking sun shines softly, casting a hazy glow on the book's title. As Rooney's palette shifts from blues, yellows, and greens to purples and pinks, streetlamps cast triangular beams of light; porch lights, doorways, and windows faintly gleam; and the starlit sky looks like it's been "sprinkled with diamonds." Interspersed throughout the book are striking silhouette scenes, with children's figures set against backdrops of textured color. It's a picture-book celebration of--and a clarion call for--unstructured, unsupervised, unplugged playtime, for children to roam and explore the outdoors and "pretend not to hear their parents' the-sun-is-gone yell: "Time to come home!'"
Reviewer: Tanya D. Auger | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2020

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