Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
The Silver Moon: Lullabies and Cradle Songs
Illustrator: Jui Ishida
Poetry Picture Book
For infants to children age 5
Greenwillow Books, 2013 ISBN: 978-0062014672
For centuries adults have been singing songs to their young children to relax them and lull them to sleep. Often the words in such songs are soft, and they mention comforting things and convey dreamy images. For this book poet Jack Prelutsky created twenty lullaby poems that can be sung or spoken. With their gently rocking rhythms and soft words, the poems create an environment that is soothing and calming.
We begin with a poem about a train that visits dreamland. The train goes “chugging down the track” and it will not return until morning, when its young passengers are ready to emerge from their “dreams of wonder” and wake up.
Later in the book we meet three animal families. We hear about a fox mother and her cub resting in their den, and see a squirrel mother checking on her baby who is fast asleep in a hole in a tree. We also see a mother pig and her seven little piglets snoozing on hay in their pen. These are scenes of tranquility and we are told that “soon my baby / will slumber by me.”
With wonderful little poems and soft illustrations that seem to glow on the page, this is a book that would make a wonderful gift for adults who have a new baby in the family.
