Noisy City Night

Noisy City Night

by Sara Anderson

This oversized board book traces a city across the span of a night - filled with the people, traffic, parks, streets, stores, and buildings that make up the town. The breadth of the urban experience may all be found here: from the bicyclist lazily gliding through the park to the raucous swooshhhhh of traffic; from the clanging crash of construction work to the quiet of a sweeping streetscape as seen from a high-floor apartment building. Vibrant colors that zing with the heat rising from a steaming sidewalk are perfectly matched to a syncopated, sound-filled, chant-again-and-again text. Ingeniously die-cut pages reinforce the experience of the city skyline in this stylish book.

This book is an excellent choice for your curious child. Noisy City Night is a constantly evolving city nightscape- the book is designed so that each page is literally a different layer of the city. As the book is read and the pages are turned, you and your child will uncover another unique part of what night is like in a busy metropolis, and learn the sights and sounds that go with it. The words are active and have a rhyming cadence that will draw your child into the rhythm of night as taxis and ambulances whirl past in a sea of lights.

Your child will have questions about the different images and want to discover the goings-on of each page. The illustrations are busy and chaotic, much like the scene they portray, but done in such a way that your child will want to know where the taxis are going, why the people are drilling, and where the babies are crying. You can help them create the scenarios for each of these occurrences as you unfold the noisy city night together.

When I read this book to Teo, the darling three year old that I work with, he loved the images most of all. When he could, he would repeat the sounds of the different vehicles and enjoyed pointing out some of the smaller details, like the people on street corners, and cats in the window. This book is a world in itself and Teo was fascinated with it.

-Kendall