Petey's Bedtime Story

From Publishers Weekly Petey is a kid who actually likes bedtime--even if he never quite gets to bed. The energetic boy splashes wildly in his bath before bounding into the lap of his sleepy mother for a bedtime story. After his yawning father reads him yet another one, the boy induces his patient parents to search under the bed for monsters and to listen to an endless recitation of prayers in which he blesses everyone he knows and says good night to each object in his room. And then he demands that they recount the events of the night he was born. When his father suggests that Petey tell the story this time, the child embellishes it with made-up details that young readers will relish--when he was born, he reports, he "was wearing a bow tie and cowboy boots." Because his parents are sound asleep when he finishes his tale, Petey climbs out of bed, heads to the kitchen for a box of cookies and devours them all in his parents' bed, leaving plenty of crumbs. Cleary's text is as buoyant and amiable as its hero, and both his real and fabricated antics are captured cleverly in Small's ( Imogene's Antlers ) stylized pen-and-ink and watercolor pictures, which have an appealing 1950s flavor. Ages 5-up. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal PreSchool-Grade 3-Unlike most preschoolers, Petey loves to go to bed. After his nightly bath/book/chase-around-the-dining-room ritual, his parents carry him off to his room. Petey then requests the story of his birth, and quickly takes over the telling from his father. His embellished version includes a run-in with a police officer, a fire truck, and his mother racing through the hospital halls in a wheelchair, and ends with Petey entering the world wearing cowboy boots, green overalls, and a bow tie. Small's cartoonlike watercolors, done in the same playful style as Imogene's Antlers (Crown, 1988), are appropriate to the action. The artist shows Petey as the busy kid he seems to be, living in a home with toys everywhere and parents who never look uptight. In all, this is an enjoyable foray into the bedtime genre, portraying a parent-child relationship similar to that in Angela Johnson's Tell Me a Story, Mama (Orchard, 1989), but with a bit of wild abandon.