Books like The Donkey's Dream
By Barbara Helen Berger
For families who mark the Nativity each year, this is a hushed, dreamlike way to sit with that story again through fresh eyes. Hushed, reverent, dreamlike, luminous.
A young bunny is carried home through quiet nighttime streets, noticing neighbors' lit windows and imagined lives, then lies awake in bed still wondering about the sounds outside.
On a late winter night, a young girl and her father walk silently into snowy woods, calling into the darkness in hopes that a real owl will answer back.
A gentle picture book imagines Cat Heaven, where beloved cats run through fields of sweet grass, play with favorite toys, and are cared for by angels who rub their noses and ears.
A poor washerwoman on the island of Martinique uses her mother's magic wand to help her beloved goddaughter Cendrillon win the heart of a rich man's son.
A mother in Thailand moves quietly through the house, hushing a lizard, a monkey, a water buffalo, and other creatures one by one so her sleeping baby won't wake.
A parent shares a string of tender wishes for a child — to find wonder in flying birds, to know love as vast and constant as the moon loves the sky.
A discarded robot with a broken heart gives shelter to an exhausted bluebird in the empty space where his heart used to be, and carries her south with the last of his failing strength.
A little boy asks his mother where the wind goes when it stops, and together they trace how endings in nature — rain, waves, day — are really just beginnings somewhere else.
An old bear settles into his cave for winter sleep and dreams he's a cub again, wandering through summer, fall, winter, and spring before waking to a world as beautiful as his dream.
A traveler pauses his horse-drawn sleigh at the edge of a snowy forest, lingering to take in the woods filling up with snow before remembering the miles and promises still ahead of him.
A tree loves a boy so completely that she gives him her apples, her branches, and finally her trunk, asking nothing in return as he grows old.
A boy tags along for a Friday night shift at the school where his dad works as a custodian, shooting baskets in the half-lit gym and sweeping the stage while the rest of the city sleeps.
