Tiger, tiger, burning bright! (Midnight Tiger - Gillian Lobel)

Member Name: kingfisher111

Product:	Midnight Tiger - Gillian Lobel
Date:	29/08/06 (206 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lovely story, vivid language, excellent illustrations

Disadvantages: none

'Midnight Tiger' is written by Gillian Lobel and illustrated by Helen Lanzrein and is a perfect book for sharing with small children.

This is a wonderful story telling of 'the midnight tiger's' escapades at night, about how he is out in the wilderness in the middle of the night, prowling through the jungle stalking his prey. All the other creatures are aware of him and respect him greatly. As night turns to morning though, we realise that although still awesome, there is nothing to be afraid of because 'the midnight tiger'is really a cat called Timmy, a pet that is loved and cherished by his family.

My daughter loves reading this book and I love sharing it with her as the language is so wonderful. Some examples of the lovely descriptive phrases are:

'A shadow shrieks in the glittering night
And drifts like a ghost through the silver light'

'And only the flare of his scarlet eye
Tells there's a tiger slinking by.'

My three year old loves the beautiful words and wants to know the meaning of every word she doesn't know, and then tends to go around using them. She tells me 'I'm prowling, Mummy!' as she creeps up behind me or 'I'm slinking!' as she crawls along behind the sofa!

Another good thing about the way the book is written is that it is all in rhyming couplets so it is helping children's awareness of how words rhyme. This also gives a lovely rhythm to the story when reading, which is also helped visually by the fact that the lines are not set out uniformly on the page but have a gentle tilt and slant to them. The whole story has a really gentle feel to it which means that even when the tiger is at it's most scariest, children are not afraid!

The nighttime illustrations are beautiful. The drawings are not sharp edged which gives an overall dreamy, mystical appearance. The tiger/cat illustrations are lovely too!

The copy of the book I have is from Oxford University Press and is printed on good quality paper. It's RRP is £4.99 although I bought it in a set of ten books from The Book People (see my review)for £10 which worked out at considerably less!

I thoroughly recommend this beautiful book and feel that it can be shared with children of all ages (and adults will enjoy it too!).

Summary: A lovely book to share with children of all ages!