3.5 STARS
How cute is Sam!? I love the cover ;-) Sam is the adorable owl who longs for a friend when he awakens at night and all the other farm and woodland animals are asleep. Lonely Sam finally finds a firefly and they strike up a friendship. The best fun is that Sam knows how to write words and he flies around forming letters, with the firefly following him, and the firefly's glow makes the words glow in the night sky. How neat! Up to this point, I like the story very much. The illustrations are wonderful (they have the old-timey night-time blue/green color that I loved so much in Dr. Seuss' "The Pale Green Pants with Nobody Inside Them") and the "easy reader" words are well chosen and evoke a touching story that is also very helpful to early readers.
I'm afraid that, after that, the story falls apart for me a little. The firefly takes his new powers and begins making words in the sky that mess with people's lives--like writing "Go" and "Stop" at the wrong times and making cars crash at intersections!!! It's very clear that Sam thinks these are BAD tricks, and the firefly eventually does get a bit of a punishment and learns his lesson (I think!) and there's a nice twist to the ending of which I ultimately approved... I think that, really, the story just got too long for my taste and I got a teensy bit bored.
Still, I think that some beginning readers will really love this story. And, since it was originally published in the mid-1950s, I just felt all happy and nostalgic (even though I wasn't born in the '50s!) holding the book in my hands and thinking of how many young readers, over the years, read this story in their living rooms and how, despite the changing fashions, home decorating schemes, and world events, a story about a cute little owl and his firefly friend continues to touch and inspire readers after all these years. Hooray for the power of books! :-)