THE NIGHT WILD

A dog nudges her way out the door of her human’s home to investigate the night.

As Dog explores, she encounters and befriends “someone WILD,” illustrated as a wolf or perhaps a coyote. They chase a rabbit together, and when daylight comes, Dog, all tuckered out, falls asleep back home. The striking thing about this story is the unusual black-and-white illustrations that are created using brushed graphite powder, pencil, and erasure on paper. Their soft, atmospheric mood and their design and distribution—full-bleed double-page spreads, single-page bleeds, and, particularly, a few stellar sequences in which multiple iterations of characters denote action—show author/illustrator Poster’s skill in telling a story with pictures. Unfortunately, the story itself has problems. Since the animals—raccoons, a bear, rabbits, the coyote or wolf, among others—are depicted behaving as animals do and not anthropomorphically, the story can’t be interpreted as a fantasy. And to romanticize a scenario in which a small domestic dog encountering a larger, wild canine would have a romp and a bit of friendship is fundamentally misleading. In the real nighttime world, the dog would more likely become the other canine’s dinner, so here’s hoping readers won’t take it into their heads to send their pet dog or cat out into the night to have a lovely adventure. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Unusual and strikingly lovely black-and-white illustrations can’t save a problematic storyline.