There Was a Shadow: A Picture Book

From New York Times Best Children’s Book author Bruce Handy, a luminous picture book that invites careful observation of light and shadow in the natural world, as well as in our own emotional landscape.

A New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2024!
A Bookshop.org Best Picture Book of 2024!
A 2025 Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year!

As the sun makes its daily journey across the sky, light comes down to illuminate our world. Moving and dancing along with this light come a variety of shadows—those cast by the sun and those cast by our feelings, minds, and memories. Here we follow a girl from dawn through dusk into night as she and her friends play with their shadows, take refuge in the shade of a large tree, and set out again for home in the violet glow of twilight.

With a lyrical text from Bruce Handy and dramatic, sensitive art from award-winning illustrator Lisk Feng, There Was a Shadow invites readers to look up and down, in and out––to notice the position of the sun and the corresponding length or shortness of shadows, as well as the subtle ways in which light and shadow reveal and obscure things both in the world and in ourselves.

With images that swell and overflow with light, this is a picture book that is sure to awe and delight.

Bruce Handy is a journalist, humorist, editor, and essayist. The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth, his first book for kids, was named a Best Children’s Book of 2021 by the New York Times. He is also the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult and the picture book What If One Day…, illustrated by Ashleigh Corrin. He lives with his family in New York City.

Lisk Feng is an award-winning illustrator. She has worked with clients such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Apple, and has illustrated several children’s books, including Everest, A Hug Is for Holding Me, and Our World. In addition to receiving recognitions from the Society of Illustrators and Communication Arts, she was selected for the 2019 Forbes “30 under 30” list for Art and Style. Originally from China, she now lives in New York City.