What a lovely book! I picked it up at the library because the cover and the title appealed to me. Looking through it, I was struck by the sparsity of words (less than ten per page) and decided that it seemed like a nice bedtime story to read over and over, and at the same time my son could probably handle reading it by himself.

Once we got home and sat down with the book, I was enthralled. The scratchboard pictures are in black and white and a striking golden yellow for emphasis. Both the text and the pictures are beautiful, poetic and imaginative. The text is so simple, a little bit in the vein of [b:Goodnight Moon|32929|Goodnight Moon|Margaret Wise Brown|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348416480s/32929.jpg|1086867]. The beginning goes something like this: "Here is the key to the house / In the house burns a light / In that light rests a bed." The pictures are full of details which reward repeated readings, such as when my son noticed that a picture hanging on a wall in the House in the Night in the little girl's bedroom was the same as one we have in our house! I'm totally in love with this gorgeous picture book. We read it many times. And when we finally had to return it, I had a really hard time letting go ...