Sleep, Little One, Sleep - Hardcover

Marion Dane Bauer is the author of many books for young readers, including the Newbery Honor book On My Honor and the New York Times bestseller My Mother Is Mine. Her other titles include A Mama for Owen, If You Were Born a Kitten, Grandmother’s Song, and Thank You for Me! She has retired from the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults where she was the first Faculty Chair. She lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and can be reached at MarionDaneBauer.com.

This lyrical, soporific book will help induce drowsiness in even the most active readers. While this author-artist team explored what form birth takes for a variety of animals in If You Were Born a Kitten, for this companion volume they take a more abstract approach. Rather than describing how nature's inhabitants sleep, here sleep itself is personified via an array of animals: as a bird, when "Sleep gathers you beneath its feathery wings," and as a lamb that "grazes softly around your bed." The images ease readers and listeners from a visual world into an imaginary and tactile one. Stammen's (A Snow Story) pastel spreads eloquently give form to the metaphors: lambs graze in a moonlit meadow, a polar bear cradles its yawning young, a blue whale can be dimly glimpsed through a haze of bubbles. Occasionally the tone sounds more emphatic or cautionary than peaceful, as in the words accompanying a picture of a lumbering tortoise: "Be patient. Sleep will come,/ trudging closer, closer, careful and slow./ Just you wait!/ Just you wait!" And the final repetition, "Let it come./ Please... let it come!" seems to evoke the desperation of parents who've run out of ideas to lull their child to slumber. But a soothing tone of voice will smooth out such subtle changes in the mood of the text. Just like the little girl pictured in the closing pages riding on a polar bear, sweet dreams are sure to follow. Ages 1-4. (Sept.)
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