Night Lights: A Sukkot Story

Barbara Diamond Goldin's 1995 picture book Night Lights: A Sukkot Story is being reissued, with new illustrations by Laura Sucher. Goldin smoothly blends her contemporary story, about a boy's fears of sleeping under the open roof of his family sukkah, with an explanation of the festival of Sukkot (which this year begins on September 20). An endnote elaborates on the meaning of Sukkot, which commemorates the wandering of the Jews in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt. Where Louise August's pictures for the original edition were just the right side of scary, Sucher's limpid, sketchy watercolors are persistently friendly: as biblical Israelites wander in the desert, a moon on the horizon smiles.