Night-Night Canada: A Sleepy Bedtime Rhyme. Katherine Sully. Illustrated by Helen Poole. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks (Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books), 2016. 20 pp., board book, $13.99. ISBN 978-1-4926-4769-0. Preschool / Ages 1-4. Review by Dave Jenkinson. **½ /4

excerpt:

Goodnight stores and plazas.
It’s closing time downtown

So put away your toys and treats
and pull your shutters down.

As parents know, the period immediately before youngsters’ bedtimes should be a time of gearing down and becoming quiet. In the board book Night-Night Canada, author Sully and illustrator Poole offer 10 double-page spreads in which Sully’s simple rhyming text and Poole’s cartoon-like illustrations model people and places doing just that – becoming quiet. In some instances, the illustrated scenes, such as that of a fire station or a shopping mall, are quite generic and could be found in almost “anywhere” Canada. Other illustrations, however, are accurate renditions of actual Canadian locations, including the lighthouse at Cap-des-Rosiers, QC, or the Centre Bell in Montreal. Still others are a blend in which a somewhat generic illustration carries a label of a real place, three examples being the Calgary zoo, the Royal Tyrrell Museum and Toronto’s High Park. The closing spread features a collage of Canadian landmarks (not to scale) that includes the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, Montreal’s Biosphere, Edmonton’s Telus World of Science, Calgary’s Saddledome, Ottawa’s Parliament Hill and Toronto’s CN Tower.

      Poole’s racial and gender-aware illustrations are full of quiet detail that invites young “readers” to linger over the pages.

      Night-Night Canada would be a useful additional purchase for home collections and libraries serving this age group.

Recommended.

Dave Jenkinson, CM’s editor, lives in Winnipeg, MB.

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