TWILIGHT COMES TWICE

A quietly alluring mood piece that focuses on the twilight times when ``night and day stand whispering secrets before they go their separate ways'' at dawn and dusk. Fletcher (Ordinary Things, p. 460, etc.) finds impressionistic images—``Dusk pours the syrup of darkness into the forest'' and ``dawn erases the stars from the blackboard of night''—that Kiesler makes concrete, by including in her lush, light-drenched paintings a girl and a dog who witness the topical observations of the text. The exploration of how these transitory periods affect the lives of people—from children playing in the park to fishermen casting out in the fading light, from commuters to the girl's family, setting the breakfast table—is achieved through an inclusive sensory range, from dusk's fireflies that swim through air to write ``bright messages in secret code,'' to dawn's smell of doughnuts outside the bakery. Words and art coalesce into an invitation to readers to move beyond the page and into their own explorations of twilight. (Picture book. 4-8)