Sleep, Little One, Sleep - Hardcover

Bauer, Marion Dane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689822502 ISBN 13: 9780689822506

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1999

Synopsis

As the sun sets, a father puts his child to bed. Weaving images of mice, of birds, and of polar bears, he tells her that sleep nibbles the last crumb of day; sleep gathers her beneath its feathery wings; and that sleep holds her tight in the furry dark. And as the images of sleep grow larger and larger, the father hopes that sleep will come to his child very soon.
In this glorious companion to If You Were Born a Kitten, Marion Dane Bauer and JoEllen McAllister Stammen have created a classic lullaby, as warm and loving as any child and parent at bedtime.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0689822502
• ISBN 13: 9780689822506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Stammen JoEllen McAllister