Wynken, Blynken and Nod

Susan Rogers was a librarian with the Laurenval School Board (Adult Services), Deux Montagnes, Quebec.

Ron Berg, illustrator of The Owl and the Pussycat (Scholastic-TAB, 1984) has now produced Wynken, Blynken and Nod in the same format. He has again taken a single poem and illustrated it in a picture book designed for young children.

As the poem begins, the picture shows a father reading his daughter a bedtime story (it is Wynken, Blynken and Nod). He tucks her in and she falls asleep. As “the old Moon laughed / and sang a song / As they rocked in the wooden shoe,” the child’s bed turns into a shoe and sails into the night sky. The illustrations are not busy and clever, like the ones in The Owl and the Pussycat, but are gentle and dreamlike, suiting the content of the poem. The clouds become fish and a rabbit, and the face of the moon is very much like that of the father. Unfortunately, there seems to be something wrong with the sequence of the last few pictures. A printing error must have reversed the order of two of them and this disturbs somewhat the magical sleepy mood that has been created. However, this is not an obvious problem, and if the reader is lucky, Berg will go on to illustrate more poetry for children.