Do your children need to have a lot of different things with them in bed when they go to sleep each night? If they do, they are like the little girl in Good Night!.

Written by Claire Masurel, the story focuses on a little girl who can't go to sleep until all her friends are in bed with her, and they include Zoe, Oscar, Jojo, Daisy, Max, and Theo. She goes around the house looking for and finding each of them and then slightly scolds them for not being in bed with her. "Silly Max. It's not time to eat! It's time to go to bed." she tells her teddy bear who she finds on the kitchen counter.

There are just a few short sentences on every page or sometimes every other page. When everyone is in bed the little girl wishes them all Good Night! The only thing I thought odd about this book was that there are no adults in the story at all. And while sometimes you can't always tell from the text, you can definitely tell there are no adults by looking at the illustrations.

The illustrations are created by Marie H. Henry using watercolors and are very creative and full of detail. We see this little girl with a ribbon in her black hair and blue pajamas wander her house. We see a mobile and a doll on a shelf, with a dress slung over a chair in her room. The living room has playing cards, a radio, and a pin cushion in it and a bookshelf has interesting little knick-knacks on display in it as well. I love Henry's attention to details and found the home, although cluttered, not dirty and filled with things that a young child would enjoy seeing.

The fun thing about this book is it seems like all the things that her toy friends are doing are things that are done at bedtime by most children, often times as a stall tactic. "I want to stay in the bath longer." "Let's read another book." I hear my son say. This little girl is telling everyone, "no more time to do that, it's time to go to bed."

Overall my three year old son and I really liked this one. I'd recommend it to children aged 2-5. It is short, but has enough to look at in each scene to allow a conversation on each page if you wanted to. The pictures are soft and sweet and the whole tone of the story is cute and perfect for bedtime.

As this book was written in 1994 it is an entry in msmorvay's Resurrecting the Oldies write-off.

Recommended: Yes