Books like A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers
By Nancy Willard
For families who like their bedtime reading strange, musical, and a little dreamlike, this inn welcomes the kind of guests that make imagination stretch a little further. Whimsical, lyrical, dreamy, and gently strange.
A young boy sets off on a moonlit walk armed with only an oversize purple crayon, drawing his own path through woods, seas, and dragons before finding his way safely back to bed.
A drowsy kitten chases a mouse right through a framed poster on the wall, tumbling into a chase across famous artworks and through history — and then must find his way back home.
A boy falls asleep holding a book and drifts into a wordless dream world where chess pieces come alive, a dragon appears, and landscapes shift from canyons into cities before his eyes.
One ordinary Tuesday evening, a pond full of frogs suddenly rises into the air on their lily pads and drifts off to explore the sleeping town nearby.
A rhyming picture book moves through the many shades of green — forest green, lime green, firefly green, sea green — using die-cut pages that turn one green into another before your eyes.
A boy longs to catch the rainbow he spots outside his window, and imagines all the wonderful ways he could play with one of his own.
A boy walks home from school and imagines wilder and wilder sights on Mulberry Street, building a story fantastic enough to tell his father.
A young ballet student listens to music from Swan Lake in her dance class and is magically transported into the story, where she meets Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer.
A gentle bedtime rhyme imagines which dream animal might carry a sleepy child off tonight — a bear to bake pastries, a fox into a magical forest, mermaids for tea.
Three children find a bag of chalk at a rainy playground and discover that whatever they draw with it springs to life right off the pavement.
A team of kid inventors heads to the zoo armed with zany traps and rhyming plans, determined to outsmart and catch the rainbow-maned unicorn.
