The Boy Who Wouldn't Go to Bed

As she did in The Bear under the Stairs (Dial, 1993), Cooper takes a gentle, wry look at a child's imagination. At bedtime, a young boy takes a fantasy trip in his little red car into a land filled with his stuffed animals and toys?all of which are larger than life. In the well-patterned,

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repetitive text, the child asks each toy to play with him; each replies in its own way that it's not the right time for playing: 'Nighttime is for resting, not racing,' says the train. As the sun goes down, the youngster journeys through puffy clouds, past bedlike mounds, and under a moon hung by a string, and finally stands 'awake and alone, with the sleeping world around him.' But not to worry, for here comes his mother to scoop him up, carry him through a land of oversized bathroom fixtures and a giant tube of toothpaste, and put him in his warm, cozy bed. With their careful, creative details (the zipper in a toy tiger's stomach, wooden soldiers parading with toothbrushes, the toy train's cars filled with sleepy nursery-rhyme characters.

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Summary: A boy who is not ready to go to bed begins to imagine that he is with all of these other toys. But then even those toys become tired. And then the car that the boy rode on to the toys gets tired so he has to find his way back to his own bed. Response: When my son gets a little older, I

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look forward to reading this book to him before bed. Connection: Read Aloud with a discussion or writing assignment of how students go to sleep even if they are not tired.

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