Children's Book Review: Go To Sleep, Little Farm

Go To Sleep, Little Farm, by Mary Lyn Ray (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, 38 pp, $16.99, ages baby - 3 years) Watch and listen to the book here.

Ah, two books (this review and the following one*) by our favorite author, Mary Lyn Ray

 (Goodnight, Good Dog, 

and A Lucky Author Has A Dog 

and more that we haven't read - yet).

We picked up Go To Sleep, Little Farm when we saw a sleeping sheep on the cover! We wanted to read it to a small circle of small friends at a large sheep event. . . .

Not only the animals but also the trees go to sleep, the pasture grows still, "quiet spreads and evening comes on - speckled with stars like the spots on a fawn."

Even inanimate objects go to sleep, one by one: "slippers asleep on the rug, . . " and "minutes that sleep inside clocks."

The words that rhyme are so unique and creative, the book simply flows. When you read it again you will hopefully notice something else - the little girl in her red 'jammies' is imitating the animals who go to sleep one by one.  And then our little girl dreams of petting the sleepy beaver, riding the sheep, snuggling with the fawn.

In children's literature so much depends on the illustrations: Christopher Silas Neal paints simple scenes on every page, chockfull of details that your young ones can pick out. 

Nevertheless, words are just as important as the illustrations. In Go To Sleep, however, author Mary Lyn Ray is not quite up to her usual marvelous self with her writing style: on the other hand, the book is uniquely creative which will lend itself to being read again and again.

Caveat: We checked this book out from the Howard County, MD, public library.

* BOOM! Big, Big Thunder & One Small Dog