THE SUMMER NIGHT

Published in 1958 as The Night Mother Was Away and reissued with new pictures and a vaguer title that suits it to today's demand for material on flexible sex roles or even atypical families (for all we know now Mother is away for more than a night), this begins and ends with a little girl's father putting her to bed. The first time she's reluctant and, as "her father could understand why on this soft summer night she wasn't sleepy," he carries her downstairs where "the gold clock on the mantlepiece seemed to say, night-time-night-time-night-time." There he reads her a story and plays a lullaby on the piano, takes her for a walk to the pond, and then gives her milk and bread with brown sugar in the kitchen, where her eyes become "dreamy and sleepy at last." Ben Shecter's soft charcoal drawings with pink and blue washes bring out the Zolotov gentleness, the warmth of the relationship, and the quiet nighttime cast of the adventure.