"Where Everyone Is Sleeping:" Go to Sleep, Little Farm by Mary Lynn Ray

SOMEWHERE A BEAVER WEAVES A BED IN A BOG.

SOMEWHERE A BEAR FINDS A BED IN A LOG.

NOW THAT THE DAY AND SUN HAVE GONE,

QUIET SPREADS AND EVENING COMES ON.

As the sunset fades to a blue twilight and deep blue night, a girl inside the farmhouse prepares to sleep, yawning a small yawn, tunneling under her covers as snug as the bear in his log. As woolly sheep sleep in their snug barn, and bees bed down deep in a rose, as tomorrow's minutes sleep in the old clock, as bedtime tales sleep inside their covers, the little girl closes her eyes. Even the worms in their holes snore little snores, zzzzzz.

Mary Lynn Ray's Go to Sleep, Little Farm (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) uses the subtle art of suggestion that all the world is sleeping to lure young listeners or readers to do likewise. As Dad switches off all the house lights and even her pocket falls asleep in her skirt, surely it is time for our girl to dream away the night. Ray's soporific couplets soothe the ear, as artist Christopher Silas Neal's pleasantly old fashioned illustrations in muted grays and blues set the scene for all eyes to close all on their own in this quiet bedtime story that mirrors all the world preparing to sleep in one small bed in one cozy room in a sleeping farmhouse.

"Ray's lullaby reads like a sequel to Goodnight, Moon, with the same offbeat humor and incantatory language extending to the farm and the forest beyond it," says Publishers Weekly in their starred review.