From Lullaby to Lullaby - Hardcover

From Geras (Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories, 1996, etc.), a lyrical answer for children who wonder ``what everybody's dream might be;/And when they close their eyes at night,/what do they see?'' A mother sits by the bed knitting ``dreams and lullabies'' as a child falls asleep: ``Follow the yarns/as the yarns unwind./What do you find?/What do you find?'' At first the daughter finds her toys, a doll walking to a tea party, a small brown bear, and a large yellow rabbit. But her wanderings expand outward to include the dreams of a real bears, a kitten chasing butterflies in a meadow, even the dream of the moon: ``What the moon would love/is a mile of space/and no thin clouds to cover her face.'' With a singsong rhythm, occasional rhyme, and gently meandering path, the text recreates the indistinct place between wakefulness and sleep. Brown's soft, whimsical watercolors of the child and her toys have the innocent look of another era, reminiscent of Gustaf Tenggren's work of the 1940s and '50s. A perfect bedtime book, both dreamily imaginative and warmly reassuring. (Picture book. 3-8) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

PreSchool-Grade 2. A mother sits by her daughter's bed knitting "dreams and lullabies" on "silver singing needles." But the verses here do not sing; instead, they meander about as the girl, along with her rocking horse and toy rabbit, visit the dreams of a doll, a bear, a cave, a kitten, a ship, and more. The rhyming pattern is erratic and sometimes disappears altogether. The dreamy, detailed watercolor illustrations meander, too. The tiger, "dreaming of jungles," sleeps among the ferns and dandelions of a deciduous forest. The repeated refrain, "What do you find as the yarns unwind?" is not reflected in the illustrations. Sometimes the child and her toy animals are huge, and sometimes tiny. It's true that dreams can be like that, but such illogical inconsistency is unsettling in a picture book. There is the seed of a lovely book here, but it doesn't quite come to fruition.?Sue Norris, Rye Free Reading Room, NY
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.