cover image Winter Lullaby

Winter Lullaby

Barbara Seuling. Harcourt Children's Books, $16 (32pp) ISBN 978-0-15-201403-2

As autumn turns to winter, the wind blows, the ground turns cold and the ""white frost creeps,"" forcing animals to find protective shelter. ""When the snow falls/ over the freshwater pond,/ where do the ducks go?/ Across the sky,/ southward they fly."" Seuling's (The Teeny Tiny Woman) text sets up a rhythm of simple questions on one spread, answered with the turn of a page by rhyming couplets that may well lull youngsters into a participatory drowsiness. Children can repeat the easily memorized, sing-song verses in response to an adult reading the questions. Newbold's broad scope of variously lit, softly rounded rural scenes--from farm to forest to desert to mountain valley--brings soothing balm to day's end. Ages 3-6. (Sept.)