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CM . . .
. Volume XI Number 14 . . . . March 18, 2005
excerpt:
"It's always darkest before the dawn." Usually, you hear the words uttered in grim desperation in a last-ditch attempt to stave off despair. But not here, not in Dawn Watch, a picture book telling of a child's stint on dawn watch with her father on a sailboat crossing of vast Lake Superior. The book sees the words differently, both literally and beyond. True, when the night is black and the air is cold, the immensity of being small and alone threatens to overwhelm. Just beyond the fear, though, under the darkness and inside the stillness, lies the promise of adventure and mystery. Imagination says anything can happen during the dawn watch, and with the saving certainty of imminent daybreak, anything can be allowed to happen.
Highly Recommended. Cora Lee is a Vancouver, BC, writer and editor.
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Pendziwol provides the details that anchor the adventure to the experience of a young girl and
narrates the night-time journey poetically in prose that is beautiful in its own right. It is, however,
the illustrator Debon's interpretation that turns a charming account of a night at sea into a study of
contrasts and emotions. Debon's paintings put the reader squarely into the dark with all its
attendant promises and threats. With dark blues and greens and blacks, the colours -- or rather
non-colours - of the night at sea dominate as Pendziwol talks us through the bleaker hours of the
watch; this is when imagination tends to run wild. As the night draws away from the approaching
dawn, so do the colours begin to shift away from black, through a soft purple, to the radiance of
pink and orange. The stillness gives way, too, to the noises of an approaching day, in parallel with
the approach of the shore. Contrasts in scale heighten the drama -- the girl and boat are tiny when
alone against the immensity of the sea in the darkest hours but are shown larger when other
people and concrete tasks bring the focus back to the familiar. The magnificence of the sky and
sea are ever present, awesome yet reassuring. A range of emotions surfaces in the hours of the
dawn watch - and Debon takes us through them all.