Night and Day by Catherine Ripley (1985) is the kind of story I never fully appreciated as a child. This entire book describes the forest as the site of hungry creatures hunting down one another for dinner. As an adult, these woods sound terrifying to me. Maybe it was illustrations like these by Debi Perna and Brenda Clark that created scenes of peaceful coexistence—in direct opposition to the text—that contributed to my delusion. There’s no killing in the text, except for a woodpecker’s beak full of insects. But “Soon the meadow is full of many hungry animals.” Although an owl closes in on prey, “The mouse jumps to safety just in time. . .Tonight, the owl will stay hungry.” Even the absence of death is distressing. All the animals except for the porcupine and rabbit appear to be carnivores.
