Baby Bedtime

"I could eat your little ears. / I could nibble on your nose. / I could munch your tiny fingers. / I could gobble up your toes." The easy rhythm of Fox's effortless-seeming opening lines leads up to a final kiss good-night. Quay's soft mixed-media art in pastel hues depicts the gentle, rounded forms of anthropomorphic parent-and-child elephants and exudes calming comfort.

Mem Fox proves once again that she's a contemporary Mother Goose as she delivers seemingly effortless rhyming verse in her latest bedtime book. "I could eat your little ears. / I could nibble on your nose. / I could munch your tiny fingers. / I could gobble up your toes." The easy rhythm of the book's opening lines evokes a "haven't-I-heard-this-before?" feeling and pulls the reader along to subsequent pages ("I could stroke your silky hair. / I could sit you on my knee. / I could sing you all the songs that my mother sang to me") that lead up to a final kiss good-night. In another artist's hands those opening words might have seemed alarming--with all their talk of eating, nibbling, munching, and gobbling--but Quay's soft mixed-media art in pastel hues depicts the gentle, rounded forms of anthropomorphic parent-and-child elephants and exudes calming comfort. Refreshingly, there's no resistance on the part of the little one: this elephant's child is plainly tuckered out and ready for baby bedtime. A good good-night book. megan dowd lambert