by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 11, 2010

"In the Middle of the Night" is the perfect bedtime book. It describes everything that happens during the night - and adds a beautiful picture. Jennifer Eachus contributed gorgeous illustrations which look like oil paintings with a night-like dim. Her second picture shows a baby sleeping fretfully in its cradle. But even the dolls in its room are sleeping too - and so is a teddy bear on the floor.

The book then looks into the outside world "a long time after bedtime." There's a garbage truck rumbling off to the dump, loaded up with "the old day's trash." A baker bakes bread, while trucks wait to deliver it. And there's also an astronomer in an observatory, who's happy that it's finally dark. She's looking for "stars and moons and spikes of light through her telescope in the middle of the night while everybody sleeps."

Part of the book's fun is the text's short, irregular rhythm which will sometimes slip into a rhyme. Kathy Henderson is an experienced author, and she's made a deliberate choice to use rhymes that aren't perfect. (For example, one describes men sorting mail on a train car "so tomorrow's mail will arrive in time / at the towns and the villages down the line.") The loose rhyming and freeform structure give a relaxed feeling to the book's narration, which starts to feel like a thoughtful and lulling poem for bedtime.

There's also a moment of darkness. (In the town's hospital "someone very old shuts their eyes and dies / breathes their very last breath on their very last night.") Yet the next page reveals that new baby was born very near, and its parents smile as it looks up for the first time, "and the world's just begun." But still everybody's sleeps, and the next page is magically describing a new scene. Now it's men sorting mail on "a train with no windows...rattling by." Past the sleeping streets, and the hospital...

On its last page, the book finally brings its focus to a home, where a mother holds the waking child in her arms. She walks up and down, several times, in the nursery where the story began. And she hears the trains pass, and the cats in the year. She hums hushabye, and tells the baby that its time to close its eyes. "We should be asleep now / you and I...

"It's the middle of the night."

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