GOING TO SLEEP ON THE FARM

As a drowsy little boy puts his toy animals into their box, he asks his sleepy dad (lying on the floor beside him) how they go to sleep. Dad replies in repetitive, soporific quatrains (""A pig curls up with her family or friends/Where one pig starts, another pig ends/And that's how a pig goes to sleep--Oink, oink./That's how a pig goes to sleep""). The book ends with the child snuggling into his own bed. In Wijngaard's lovely, luminous art, the relaxed poses of man and boy are wonderfully authentic. Meanwhile, the exquisitely portrayed animals are added, one by one, to a pleasant farmyard, depicted from several imaginatively chosen points of view (including the child's window), all nicely summed up in the endpapers' broader vistas of the farm at sundown and by moonlight. A captivating bedtime book, wrought with unusual thought and care.