Barnyard Prayers

A boy's toy farm animals come to life and talk to God in a series of prayers.

PreSchool-Grade 2-Beginning with "The Farmer's Prayer" and ending with "The Farmer's Benediction," this book shows typical farmyard animals and insects praying according to their natures. The selections are more respectful than religious in tone. Adults will appreciate the many double meanings, some of which children will also enjoy. The cow prays its stomachs aren't bigger than its eyes, for example, and the drones pray that God will save their queen. Some poems are juxtaposed, such as the fox's prayer for hens to eat that appears on the same page as the hens' prayers at the realization that one of their number is missing. The bright, primary-colored acrylic illustrations bring the book to life. The opening selection is illustrated with a picture of a small boy with his toy farm. In the succeeding pictures he enters into a fantasy in which he joins living animals. The second to the last poem is the sheep's prayer to "help me count myself to sleep," followed by illustrations that move readers back into the boy's city bedroom, with him asleep in a bed covered with farm toys. The sense of playfulness and the comforts of the toy farm are winningly evoked in the glow of the illustrations. This title should be popular in collections where bedtime stories for young children are in demand, although parents should be forewarned they will be expected to read all 19 poems before a sleepy child will turn off the lights.
Barbara Chatton, College of Education, University of Wyoming, Laramie
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Words and pictures play equal roles in this inviting volume, which playfully reprises and refreshes familiar themes and conceits. Selznick's (The Houdini Box) paintings first present a city boy preparing for sleep. Opening his little red barn set, he takes out a toy animal; in subsequent pictures, now full-bleed, the boy has entered the world of the animals, stroking a colt, visiting the henhouse, etc. The boy's deep affection for his charges is palpable, but the vigorous variety of perspectives and a certain mischief in some of the animals' expressions steer this fantasy safely clear of nostalgia. Godwin's (Christmas in the Manger) text consists of a series of verse prayers, each offered by a different character. These, too, mix the cozy with the puckish. The first poem, "The Farmer's Prayer," which faces an image of the boy in his bedroom, is fairly conventional ("Watch over us, protected, whole,/ And bless this farmer's happy soul"). Other sequences are droll. The fox's prayer includes the plea "One fine fat hen is all I ask. / Besides, [those hens] are so foolish they'd never notice if one of their own were missing"; on the opposite page, the hens pray: "We ask You once again/ To watch over us all,/ Six, seven, eight,/ Nine nine? Amen." A few poems turn jokey (the drones' prayer ends with "And God/ Save our queen), but on the whole this bedtime book will grab hold of kids' imaginations. Ages 3-7. (Mar.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

PLB 0-7868-2302-X Bedtime prayers are uttered by a young boy and his toy farm creatures as they prepare for sleep in the boy's city apartment bedroom. As in Sandra Jordan's Down on Casey's Farm (1996), the toy animals become real and the setting rural in the child's imagination; here, it happens as prayers unfold. The boy begins with a general benediction: ``Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord/My farm to keep.'' The animal prayers tend to be more humorous, such as the pig giving thanks for the mud, rain, and the scratching administered by the farmer; the bees ask God to save the queen; the mouse pleads ``Think me not a rat and please/Protect me from the cat.'' The fox is the most amusing of all, with an urgent rap to his Lord to deliver unto him one plump chicken, and the cow is rapt when she prays, ``Lord, I hope my stomachs/Aren't bigger than my eyes,/But how I love each blade of green/That grows beneath the skies.'' Selznick's animals are fittingly beatific, and the color has a marvelous lacquered effect, deep enough to dip a toe in, or to dream over. (Picture book. 3-7) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 2^-4, younger for reading aloud. A child's toy animals join him for bedtime prayers: the pig offers thanks for mud, rain, and the farmer who "keeps me fed, / Scratches my back / And scratches my head"; a spider prays for no rain but lots of flies; the cow expresses love for "each blade of green / that grows beneath Thy skies"; and so on, until the sheep's simple prayer for help "to count myself to sleep." Gentle humor lightens the reverence in Godwin's poetry and also in Selznick's peaceful, twilit paintings: the plastic pig becomes a real one, wallowing blissfully in mud; the goat nibbles on the young farmer's pajamas; and the cat breaks off its prayer to eye a mouse with green-eyed intensity. In the end, the farmyard becomes a bedroom again, with the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge shining in the window, and a parent looking in on the snuggled-down child. The poems and pictures work together unusually well to capture the imagination animating this evening ritual. John Peters
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