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.