by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 20, 2009

It had been one year since Step Into the Night, but author Joanne Ryder was ready for another visit to nature. This time it's the morning that's being explored - along with all of the creatures enjoying it - and Ryder teamed up again with illustrator Dennis Nolan. It's a poetic subject which she approaches with a suitable wonder. According to the jacket for the book, Ryder's interest in animals even led her to a job at the San Francisco Zoo!

It's all visualized with a girl intrigued by the wild creatures in her yard on the "Mockingbird Morning." A beautiful two-page illustration shows a bird singing on a leafy branch which twists outside the girl's window. Ryder provides words for the mockingbird's chirps. ("I am here. I am here. Happy day! Happy day!") And she also seems to know what's being said by a pair of turtles doves that appears two pages later. "I am here. You... I am here. You?"

The text is simple, but it's very abstract, like a poem. For example, she writes that the wind tickles the sparrow's feathers, then tickles the girl's face, while a peach tickles her insides. Ryder blurs the lines between nature and the little girl - before she explores the leaves and trees and lake around her. And to make the story even more intimate, it's written in the second person. A turtle's shell is a box in the woods, unopened, and "You touch it but cannot break the spell. You sit beside it, not moving, wishing it would open."

The simple sights near her house are enough to fascinate the little girl. A leafy tree's branches droop like a curtain, and a goose swims through the curtain "into the big room beyond." The girl plays with reflecting sunlight until "you see the flash of golden scales, the swirl of pale fins deep in the water." It's never identified as a goldfish, but "a golden treasure" that is hidden again once it swims away. And instead of dragonflies, there's "thin green sticks" that suspend themselves over the water like magic. The little girl is envious of their long clear wings, and wishes she had a pair "to surprise."

There's no pattern to the girl's wandering, and at one point she simply lies on the grass and stares at the clouds. When she sits on a rock, she scares off a lizard and a robin. But the drawings of her face lend a real significance to it all, since these simple sights seem to captivate her with wonder. And Ryder does the rest, by describing everything with her freeform poetry. ("Bees in fat fuzzy suits wander like astronauts from moon to moon touching down crashing softly making each moon dance and dance.") And at the end of the book, she's triumphantly assigns different words to the mockingbird's song.

"We are here. We are you. Happy day! Happy day!"

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