Who? My name Is Not Millie! by Mark Pett

It’s evening, and Millie’s dad is trying to move things along toward the final goal–-bedtime!

Dinner comes first, and from another room, it doesn’t sound as if Millie has finished her food yet.

“Millie, stop playing with your green beans!”

But at the table there is a robin, about to eat a worm.

“I’m not Millie!”

The same thing happens when Dad fusses about the spilled milk.

But alligator on the table denies everything. What’s all this about this Millie person?

That black cat lapping the spilled milk from the floor is not Millie, either. Nor is the goat on the table top or the bouncing kangaroo in the living room or the koala climbing the lamp, or the porpoise in bathtub. The turtle creeping across the room denies everything... slowly.

“I...am...not...Millie.”

But Millie’s savvy parent knows how to get the message through and Operation Bedtime on track.

“Oh. If you see her, tell her I have some ice cream for her.”

And a freshly-bathed and pajama-ed person appears, vouchsafing that she indeed IS MILLIE.

All’s well that ends with bubble-gum ice cream in Mark Pett’s story of an inventive bedtime resistor, in his I'm Not Millie! (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). Artist Pett provides the pictorial version of simile, drawing on popular animals in this funny story of a light-hearted bath-and-bedtime battle, modeled after Pett’s own daughter, in a tale of inventive bedtime stalling that will give kids a giggle while reminding them that parents see all and know all!.

Share this one with Sarah Maizes' equally funny On My Way to the Bath (see my review here) for more bedtime merriment.