Med McKinlay’s 2024 How to Make a Bedtime is a gentle picture book about putting a little to bed, or a beloved little. Karen Blair’s illustrations are likewise gentle: there are no hard boundaries to figures, and all pictures look like they’ve been colored in, perhaps in chalk, perhaps crayon.
The book moves from sunset to actually going to bed, and goes from an unidentified floor on the first story of a home upstairs, where the child gets a bath, pajamas, and tucked in–only to be guided back out of bed to the bookshelf, for a bedtime story. The bear who is guiding the child–perhaps a beloved stuffed animal, perhaps a parent turned animal-shaped by love and sleepiness–actually says, “Wait! Don’t shut those eyes!” when they need to get the book. (Why anyone would keep a child from falling asleep…?)
McKinlay tells her story in verse. She starts with a quatrain on each of the first two pages, then moves to two lines on the third page and two on the fourth. The fifth page is just image–the bear drying the child post-bath–and a quatrain on page six, and so on. The rhyme scheme is ABCB, with the second and fourth lines rhyming. The rhythm is a bit odd. There are 7 syllables in the first line, 5 on the second, 6 in the third, and 5 in the fourth, for example, Other quatrains follow a similar structure: lines that are close in length, but not always the same. The shortest lines do seem a bit abrupt at times, and typography can be confusing. Some words in each quatrain are presented in bold, and sometimes the reason for the bold is clear: after a bath you want your kid to be both warm and dry, for example. Others, though, are mildly baffling: why “or under the bed”?
Those objections are likely to bother only grown ups, though, or even just picky grown ups. This is a gentle book that models the process of going to bed, and lets children know they are loved, and can trust a routine.
