WHERE DO JET PLANES SLEEP AT NIGHT?

Jet planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, blimps—these are just some of the anthropomorphized flying machines that need to bed down at night.

Following two similar books on digging machines and steam trains, the author-illustrator team uses simple rhyming verses and deeply colored, full-bleed, double-page paintings to pull young readers into a dreamy world in which planes and other flying transportation have big friendly eyes and wide smiles. There’s also a cheery mouse cropping up in each spread to encourage readers to keep their eyes peeled. Even Air Force One makes an appearance. This deep-blue spread depicts the plane on the tarmac, dreaming about flying over Mount Rushmore. The mouse waits nearby in a long black limo. Many illustrations include a parent machine and a child one, as in the skywriting plane pages. The young plane sports a smiley face on its vertical stabilizer. The verse reads: “Where do skywriting planes sleep / after writing way up high? / Do moms read them bedtime stories / that are written in the sky?” In the purple sky, the words “ONCE UPON A TIME…” appear. The book ends peacefully in a bedroom filled with toy planes, the mouse, and a white human child asleep, ostensibly dreaming of all these aviation adventures.

Combining a quiet, nocturnal story with the ever popular subject of flying machines, this is a nifty bedtime book for budding aviators.