Where Do Jet Planes Sleep at Night?

March 1, 2017
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. (Picture book. 4-6)

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