Dawn

3.5

4.3 (1)

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Author(s)

Marc Martin

Publisher

Candlewick Studio

Genre(s)

Age Range

Release Date

July 29, 2025

ISBN

978-1536232400

Buy This Book

With gorgeous artwork and a spare text, an award-winning picture-book creator gently celebrates the natural world through the lens of a sunrise.

As the sun slowly rises, many things happen in a small window of time. The world comes alive with the actions of animals, plants, clouds, and sky. A deer drinks, an owl wakes, a dandelion shimmers in the light. A ladybug climbs, a fish jumps, birds call in a chorus. Geese fly away in formation. A flower blooms. Beautifully illustrated with glowing imagery and written with a charming simplicity holding appeal for new readers, Marc Martin’s ode to the slow-blooming beauty of a sunrise and the life that unfolds in its radiance narrows the lens to show the wonder of time passing.

Editor review

1 review

A good way to ease into the day

October 12, 2025 (Updated: June 25, 2026)

Overall rating

3.5

Plot

3.0

Characters

3.0

Writing Style

3.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

5.0

With gorgeous illustrations and single words, we see the morning unfolding along a lake. In panels that almost look like photographs, we see a deer as it stands still, runs off, and leaves ripples in the water along a bank, the fuzz being slowly blown off of a dandelion, water dripping off a blade of grass on which a lady bug sits, and a fish stalking and eating a bug. The pace is slow and deliberate; it reads as if someone who is very tired is slowly sipping a cup of coffee on a porch while watching the morning unfold. The pictures all become brighter, and the last two double page spreads show the pinkish yellow "sky" followed by "sun" as the day begins.

Good Points

The illustrations are all museum quality; I could just see a museum exhibit of them. This could almost be a wordless picture book, but the words chosen all seem very deliberate, and are used in a way that creates a sense of movement.

This is a good counterpart to the hustle and bustle of Silverman and Fournier's Wake Up City and Kiernan Campion's Good Morning, City, and a more impressionistic view of mornings than Ericson and MacKay's Too Early or Pilkey's The Paperboy.