Bedtime books for under fives

Writer and critic Dina Rabinovitch is the author of Take Off Your Party Dress, a book about living on the brink of a cure for cancer. Taking a break from blogging about attempting to raise money for cancer research without running a marathon, she came up with a long list of bedtime books for under fives.

Here are only three of her suggested authors:

The Green Ship by Quentin Blake

Two children stumble into a widow's private sanctuary, a garden with hedges trimmed into the shape of a ship, in memory of her husband. They don't realise this, and nor will the listening child, but that is the extraordinary thing about children's fiction; how at its best it engrosses on two quite different levels.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, and The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, by Mo Willems

Willems used to work on Sesame Street, so no surprise that he can hook children and adults with a series of speech bubbles and a classy duck-egg blue and sandy beige colour palette.

Clarice Bean, That's Me; I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato; I Am Not Sleepy and I Will Not go to Bed; My Uncle is a Hunkle; Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? by Lauren Child

The truth is that any book by Lauren Child is like a paean to childhood, completely within a child's thinking and yet creating a world distinctly of Child's own. But of her work so far these are my favourites. You will have your own.

Click here to see the many other recommended titles from Rabinovitch's list.

--Marshal Zeringue