The Longest Night: A Passover Story

I liked this book. The first reason I liked this book is for its connections between the prose and the illustrations. For example, on the page that detailed about the children making houses for others against their will, the text said “All around me, eyes to ground…Other children trudged

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around” and the illustrations depicted numerous children carrying bricks in sashes and all of them were looking down, so sad that they had to work like they were. By making the text and the pictures so connected, I was able to picture how dozens of little children looked when working like slaves, and although I would rather not picture that scene, I enjoyed being able to engage wit the book so much and feel the emotions the children felt by looking at the unfortunate scene and reading the powerful text. Another reason I liked this book was for the attention given to the faces of the characters in the illustrations. Although the illustrations were drawn rather lazily, the faces of all the characters were heavily detailed, which actively expressed the character’s emotions on each page. For example, on the page in which the main character was told to go out into the night and get water, her facial expressions excessively showed how terrified she was to go out alone at night. I loved this aspect of the book because it made it easy to empathize with the characters and live the emotions they were feelings when performing the strenuous and fearsome acts all throughout the book. Overall, the big idea of this book was to tell the reader the popular Jewish tale of what people of the Jewish heritage went through before they were led to a land where they were no longer slaves and free to do what they wished.

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The main message of this story is telling a point of view of one girl during Passover. The main message is that they escape the horrible slavery that they have been enduring.
One reason I liked this book was because of the descriptive detail in the text. The author did a good job of making you feel

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like you were there. For example she writes, "Night like blindness, thick like tar, from our window stretched so far." She did a good job of making you feel like you were there.
Following that, another thing I liked about the text was how she described objects as people. It made you feel more connected with the scenery which really set the tone of the story. For example when talking about the river she writes, "First the river bloomed and bled, stained her banks a rusty red."

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