31 in 31 Day 6: The Midnight Library

I love libraries.
When I was moving around the country in my early twenties,
the first thing I’d do when I got somewhere new was to get a library card!
I still have all the little tags on an old keyring of all the libraries that used to be mine J

For now, my library loves are in Santa Cruz.
There’s one I can walk to quickly from my house,
and a bigger branch downtown with used books for sale too.
There’s also a Little Free Library right outside my house that I’m the librarian of J

But a Midnight Library?
I’ve never gone to one of those!

Title: The Midnight Library
Published by: Roaring Brook Press, 2014
Written by: Kazuno Kohara
Illustrated by: Kazuno Kohara
Word Count: 404
Pages: 32

In one word: Librarytastic!
In one sentence: A little librarian and her three owls have fun and solve challenges and problems in their library that stays open from midnight to dawn
Favorite pages:

Likes:
The art, OH the art! I do some linoleum prints myself (nothing this amazing!) and I LOVE the texture and look of prints. The limited colors and the sweet illustrations draw you right in.

It’s a library, so what’s not to like? I love the conflicts in this story too; they’re sweet and handled in a way that makes everyone happy.

The spin of a library open at night is so interesting!

I dare you to read this book and not want to open a library at night! (I sort of want to now, but, unlike the owls, I tragically must sleep at night!)

I love the design too. The words are placed in just the right spaces so each spread looks like a carefully designed work of art!

Learns:
Put a spin on a classic theme or idea and you’ve got a classic yourself!
Libraries? Done before. Midnight libraries with owls helping? Fresh!

All kinds of art and textures work in picture books. If you’re an illustrator, play around with different tools to see what comes up!

Get right to the point in the first sentence! This first sentence is: “Once there was a library that opened only at night.” Bam. Done!

Have you read this one?
What did you read today?

Until tomorrow,
KE 🙂