Wynken, Blynken and Nod

For over one hundred years children have been lulled to sleep by Eugene Fields lilting lyrics recounting the voyage of Wynken Blynken and Nod who set off in a wooden shoe to sail "on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew." Johanna Westerman sets her picture book interpretation of this beloved bedtime poem in a moonlit Dutch landscape. Her fisherman three children dressed in nightclothes and their fey little cat navigate a sturdy sabot across the starry sky on what is indeed - "all so pretty a sail." The artists muted palette captures the nights special luminosity producing illustrations that are as soothing to the eyes as Fields verses are to the ears. The result is a bedtime book that will send little ones off to pleasant dreams of the "wonderful sights that be."