Tony Johnston, The Barn Owls. Illustrated by Deborah Kogan Ray. Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing, 2000.
This is such a quiet book. "The barn has stood in the wheat field one hundred years at least." It shelters the barn owls, who wake by day and by night, who call and are answered or not answered, who hunt and hatch their eggs, among the mice and spiders and snakes who share the barn with them, as they have always done. Like other great nonfiction books for preschoolers, The Barn Owls is precise and poetic in its language, and powerful in its images--one painting of an owl in flight prompted a three-year-old reader to observe that it looked like a woman wearing a white cape stretching out her arms. And it is in this way that young children's interest in the world around them, especially the unseen world of the night (or, for many children, the world of the countryside), is sustained--not with the multiplicity of facts that enthrall the oldest elementary school children, nor even anthropomorphic narratives that charm those just beginning school, but rather with this steady gaze, this rhythmic repetition, this linking of time and nature, of owls and mice, of barns and animals.