While You Were Sleeping

Written and illustrated by Briana Corr Scott

Nimbus Publishing

978-1-77471-205-4

32 pp.

Ages 3-7

September 2023

There are so many versions of families but, when a little one is born, their lives are transformed. Nova Scotian author and artist Briana Corr Scott speaks to all those families as they live, work, play and dream while those little ones, even as they age, sleep.

From While You Were Sleeping, written and illustrated by Briana Corr Scott

In rhyming verse, Briana Corr Scott shows a mother and father with baby strapped in a front-facing carrier preparing a baby's room for wallpaper and paint. As the baby continues to rest in a rocker, the parents finish the room with crib, sheets, and more. But this is but one family. Another is one visited by a trio of aunties, themselves of different skin shades, who coo and admire the child as they sleep. A street scene shows babies and young children in strollers, in front wraps, backpacks and wagons, all sleeping as their caregivers stroll. On a beach, two fathers and their sheepdog wander with their child, while two moms catch their own forty winks in between folding laundry. 

From While You Were Sleeping, written and illustrated by Briana Corr Scott

While their babies sleep, caregivers of all kinds-mothers, fathers, grandparents, and more–go to their jobs and school, do housework, and rest.

But while they sleep, those little ones are growing and they are growing up, until they make their own homes. Still the memories that were made remain.

From While You Were Sleeping, written and illustrated by Briana Corr Scott

While You Were Sleeping may be a lovely bedtime story to send your child off to slumber but I read it more as a tribute to the parents and caregivers who live, work, learn, and love behind the scenes. They are the parents who nurture and provide, who cherish and struggle, but who always keep on. Briana Corr Scott, herself a mother of three, undoubtedly knows the wonders and the challenges of bringing up a child and managing a household, a job, and more while caring for that child. And even though it is work, often requiring multitasking and asking for help, the rewards are more than sufficient.

If you know a family with a newborn, I recommend sharing While You Were Sleeping with them. Briana Corr Scott's touching words will surely resonate with them.

We went to our jobs

We woke with the dawn

We longed to be home

And we loathed being gone...

 

          While you were sleeping.

And her paintings, resplendent with colours and patterns, visit the homes of all types of families, from those with single parents to multigenerational ones, and include multiracial and same-sex parents. Everyone is making a family, while their children sleep, and Briana Corr Scott shows them to us. Your children may fall asleep as you read this, but I know a tear or two will venture out onto your cheeks as you do so.

The Moon King

Written and illustrated by Cara Kansala

Breakwater Books

978-1-550818185

36 pp.

Ages 2-7

February 2020 

Newfoundland author and artist Cara Kansala brings the energy of her Maritime home to a story about The Moon King whose dancing unintentionally unleashes the night and its many stars across the land.

From The Moon King by Cara Kansala

In rhyming verse that carries the story like a milky way of celestial elements, Cara Kansala tells of the Moon King's distress at releasing the stars of the night sky onto the land.

They settled on the rocky cliffs 
and tip-toed into caves.
Some drifted into firths and fiords,
some waltzed upon the waves.

The Moon King watched the landscape bloom
with the faintest, starry light.
The sea glowed like a streetlamp,
he had tipped over the night!

In her dazzlingly coloured acrylic paintings, Cara Kansala depicts the Moon King's desperation to return the stars to the heavens, with the help of wildlife woken from slumber. There is the Arctic hare, the moose, the black bear, the fox, wolves and even a whale who are enlisted to help gather the stars before a flock of red birds fly them back up to the night.

From The Moon King by Cara Kansala

And all the birds in all the land,

they each plucked out a star

and flew them back up to the night

where dreams and wishes are.

From The Moon King by Cara Kansala

Though young children will be lulled to sleep with this bedtime story's rhythm, the energy in Cara Kansala's artwork may invigorate them to investigate more closely. There may be a blue, black and turquoise night sky background peeking out from behind each illustration but those brilliant stars and menagerie of Newfoundland fauna urge closer scrutiny. You'll get your little ones to bed eventually but I suspect that it may take several repetitions of The Moon King's reading before it will happen readily. Fortunately with the stars back where they belong, their sleep will be filled with goodness and light.

Way Back Then

by Neil Christopher

Illustrated by Germaine Arnaktauyok

Inhabit Media

978-1-77227-021-1

40 pp.

Ages 3-5

November 2015

Inhabit Media, an Inuit-owned publishing company that “aims to promote and preserve the stories, knowledge and spirit of northern Canada”, produces wonderful picture books many of which CanLit for LittleCanadians has had the pleasure of reviewing, including Games of Survival, Grandmother Ptarmigan, The Blind Boy and the Loon, The Legend of Lightning and Thunder, Lesson for the Wolf, Painted Skies, Sweetest Kulu, Kamik An Inuit Puppy Story, and Tuniit: Mysterious Folk of the Arctic.  Way Back Then continues that tradition by focusing on the Inuit oral tradition of a father, Kudlu, who begins to tell his sweet children, his “kuluit”, stories his grandparents told him about what things were like long ago.

There is the origin story of night and day, based on a fox who wanted darkness so that it could steal from others, and the one of how sea mammals arose from a woman tricked into marryng a bird spirit.  The myths about the origins of the caribou that fill the North and how the land populated itself with babies that were adoped by people of the North are also shared with Kudlu’s children.  And then there are the tales of magical igluit (pl. of iglu) that could travel through the air and of the nanurluk, the giant polar bear, which could be so large as to be mistaken for icebergs (see illustration below).

The stories, however, are short and not always complete, as Kudlu whispers to his sleeping children that “…when I was a child, I always fell asleep before my grandparents got to the end of each story, and I never heard the endings.” (pg. 33) Regardless, these stories are born of a time of magic and a place wholly arctic and lovingly illustrated by Inuit artist Germaine Arnaktauyok.  Germaine Arnaktauyok's illustrations, drawn meticulously with pen and coloured pencils, have a somewhat pointilistic flavour to them because of the visible dotting.  Yet, the artwork is easily identifiable (unlike much pointilism) and has an essence of ethereal realism to it, easily complementing the magic and natural world of Neil Christopher's stories and text.

Way Back Then may be short, incomplete myths told within the context of a bedtime story, but it is a larger-than-life (much like the lemming and giant polar bear within) story that celebrates oral storytelling, both in Inuktitut and English here, that will provide parents and educators with the seeds for expanding that storytelling practice to a new generation.

Mouse Tales

by Philip Roy

Art by Andrea Torrey Balsara

Ronsdale Press

978-1-55380-262-4

32 pp.
Ages 4-8

February, 2014

Happy the Pocket Mouse, the star of Philip Roy's new picture book series from Ronsdale Press, doesn't seem very happy when he can't sleep and insists that he would fall asleep very quickly if John, his human friend, would just tell him a bedtime story.  With the love of a parent or caregiver, John awakens (okay, Happy does have to open his eyelid) and considers the best story to tell, without frightening Happy.  He starts with the story of Hansel and Gretel, providing answers to Happy's multitude of questions and comments e.g., "How poor were they?" "That's not scary." "She made her house out of GINGERBREAD and CANDY?" Although he's being very brave and inquisitive, Happy is shocked to learn that witches keep spooky things like mouse tails in little jars. Well, Happy's very ready to go to sleep then (or at least end that story) but he has more questions, to which the answers are even more unsettling.  So our adorable little rodent, with the incessant questions, clever ideas and passive determination (really!), finds the means to sleep, albeit with a few detours.

Happy and John take me back to the days of Topo Gigio snuggling up to "Eddie" on The Ed Sullivan Show*, though I see a compassionate John Lennon in Mouse Tales' John. (Is the same name just a coincidence?)  The repartee Philip Roy has penned between the two is brisk, endearing and expressive, and never will the reader believe there is anything but love between these two individuals. And Andrea Torrey Balsara, a new illustrator definitely to watch in youngCanLit, gets the right mix of sweetness and reality, never going saccharine on the characters or the setting.

I love Mouse Tales and look forward to reading it to my kindergarten students, luckily never close enough to bedtime for them to adopt Happy's concerns.  But I especially look forward to more adventures in the Happy the Pocket Mouse series, knowing that the collaboration between Philip Roy and Andrea Torrey Balsara is marked for great youngCanLit success.

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* If you're too young to remember Topo Gigio, check out the first 30 seconds of the YouTube video at http://youtu.be/QjkElT5w6AE.

Grandmother Ptarmigan

by Qaunaq Mikkigak and Joanne Schwartz

Illustrated by Qin Leng

Inhabit Media

978-1-927095-52-2

24 pp.

Ages 0-4

2013

While a grandmother ptarmigan seeks to get a little one to sleep, Grandmother Ptarmigan is actually a traditional Inuit origin tale that explains why ptarmigans cry, "Nauk, Nauk" and why baby ptarmigans fly so young.

Just as many human parents try a variety of strategies to help their young ones go to sleep, a little ptarmigan's grandma sings to him, tells him to close his eyes, and tucks him in, but he continues to demand a story.  Well, she tells him a story, obviously a little more feather-raising than she intended, though it does end with affectionate tickles. Unfortunately, the little ptarmigan is so frightened that his reaction is to fly away, much to the distress of his grandmother.

Qaunaq Mikkigak, an elder from Cape Dorset, Nunavut, shares a traditional Inuit origin tale in Grandmother Ptarmigan, written in collaboration with children's author Joanne Schwartz.   I applaud the successful efforts of these authors in divulging an origin tale from the Aboriginal Peoples of our own continent.  In addition to reaffirming the Inuit culture for young people, Grandmother Ptarmigan reminds us that origin tales do not all stem from Africa or lands with which youngCanLit readers are unfamiliar.  Along with Qin Leng's deceptively simple but effective illustrations, Qaunaq Mikkigak and Joanne Schwartz bring the origin tale to roost appropriately amidst the rich stories told by the Aboriginal Peoples of North America, here courtesy of Inhabit Media. Thank you.