GOOD NIGHT TO ANNIE

A bedtime ABC featuring a moppet in a polka-dot mobcap and assorted entities--Alligators, Cats, Inchworms, Jets--doing their nighttime thing. Now and again one finds a pleasant word-and-picture configuration (""Elephants are curling in with their dark trunks""; ""Penguins are folding in their flippers""); often, though, the imagery is strained beyond the natural order of things. ""Jets are flying through feathers of silver moonlight,"" not particularly apt in itself, is illustrated by a jet trailing pink, fluttering streamers (like no jet stream anyone ever saw) while the standard twinkling sky carries no suggestion of ""feathers."" Even more unnatural--in its very conception--is the rainbow arching over the dark-of-night sky. A very few felicities, then, along with many fey imaginings and commensurately artsy, quasi-old-fashioned pictures.