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This nautical adventure takes place at the proverbial darkest hour – just before dawn – while a young girl is helping her father keep watch as they sail across Lake Superior at night. Looking out for “ships and light and land and logs,” she takes in an array of wonders: the Northern Lights, illusory sea monsters, a spectacular dawn. The words and pictures are a superb fit: each uses perspective for dramatic effect, and they combine to create a contemplative and sometimes rapturous atmosphere.

The economic style of the narrative suits the tidy, pragmatic life on a boat, making the occasional simile or evocative adjective seem all the lovelier. Paragraphs filled with procedural details and nautical terms are interspersed with lyrical touches such as the “Northern Lights danc[ing] iridescent green” or the melancholy refrain, “I was alone on the sea.”

When she was a teenager, Ontario-based author Jean Pendziwol spent a year sailing with her family on their boat, Winter Solstice. Illustrator Nicolas Debon spent a day on the same boat as part of his research for the pictures. Debon, who used to live in Toronto but now lives in Versailles, France, has taken great care with the paintings, using a limited palette of dark blue, green, and grey, with white for the shadows and reflections created by the night sky. When a bright detail appears, as with an approaching ship’s red light or the orange sky at dawn, the contrast is highly effective. Pendziwol and Debon have another picture book, The Red Sash, due out in a year or so; it should be well worth the wait.