Someone has probably shared with you Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes’ Go the F***k to Sleep, an irreverent children’s book that perfectly captures bedtime frustrations. It’s not a book to share with children, but here are some great new books you can.
Willa Perlman’s Good Night, World (Beach Lane, ages 0-3) is reminiscent of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon in title, tone and even an animal to track on every page. While Brown’s bunny hero bids bonne nuit to everything in his room, Perlman’s update has a tow-headed, bunny-dragging toddler going global in his gute nachtes. Two- page spreads celebrate planets, deserts, oceans and animals with illustrations as diverse as the book’s locales and the last page of goodnights in sixteen languages.
Albert Lamb’s Tell Me the Day Backwards (Candlewick, ages 2-4) has an ingenious bedtime strategy. David McPhail’s warm illustrations show a tender Mama Bear tucking her baby in with a remembering game. Her gentle reminders prompt everything from brushing teeth in the stream to waking up from hibernation. The conversational tone is sweet, not saccharine and introduces a great technique to try.
Humor and a unique heroine enliven bedtime in Sean Taylor’s The World Champion of Staying Awake (Candlewick, ages 3-5). Stella can’t follow her father’s order to sleep because of her stuffed animals who vying for the title of “world champion of staying awake”. The poetic and resourceful Stella rocks and gets them dozing one-by-one in a book that sparkles with dialogue and a snuggly satisfying end.
Put the brakes on with two vehicular wind-down books. Sherri Duskey and Tom Lichtenheld’s Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site (Chronicle, ages 3-5) shows anthropomorphized, active trucks working, slowing at sunset, then sleeping as illustrations soften and rollicking rhymes quiet. What could be better than truck descriptions, changing rhythms, and trucks modeling sleep?
Hollie Durand’s Mitchell’s License (Candlewick, ages 4-6) begins: “Mitchell never ever wanted to go to bed until his dad finally said he could drive there”. The illustration shows Mitchell at 3 years, nine months and five days old wielding a license to drive….his father! The car metaphor and humor don’t end until Mitchell is plunked in bed, on the road to some sleep-driving.
Ava’s the heroine of Susanna Hills’ Can’t Sleep Without Sheep (Walker, ages 4-6). Her active mind even wears out the sheep she’s counting. Exhausted, they come up with a string of replacement animals-- all are as problematic as the catapulted penguins and crane-lifted hippos. Ava solves the problem by complimenting the sheep until they tell her that she can “count” on them. The slapstick, whimsical Illustrations and the fantastical text are a dreamy blend.
Karma Wilson’s Mama, Why? (McElderry, ages 2-4) is a lullaby conversation as a sleepy polar bear cub wonders with a string of whys, all answered by his mother with magical lyricism. Simon Mendez’s illustrations are soft and glowing and lull as much as the gentle lyricism and magical imagery of sweet dreams sent on silver beams and spun from tales of twinkling stars.