Eugenie Doyle

A captivating exploration of how a family gets a farm ready for the snow of winter, Sleep Tight Farm lyrically connects each growing season to the preparations at the very end of the farm year. This beautiful and informative book paints a fascinating picture of what winter means to the farm year and to the family that shares its seasons, from spring's new growth, summer's heat, and fall's bounty to winter's well-earned rest. All year long the farm has worked to shelter us, feed us, keep us show more warm, and now it's time to sleep. show less

A farm family prepares for winter in this lovely picture-book from author Eugenie Doyle and illustrator Becca Stadtlander. As they prepare each field and structure - the strawberry patch, the chicken coop, and so on - for the coming snows, they also bid them goodnight. By the time the weather has turned, and the world is blanketed in white, they are ready for the coming season...

Doyle, who makes her picture-book debut with Sleep Tight Farm: A Farm Prepares for Winter, is the co-owner and show more proprietor of a small farm in Vermont, and her love for and knowledge about farm life shines through in her gentle, heartwarming text. The accompanying artwork from Stadtlander - it is described on the colophon as having been created using 'paint,' which seems a very vague description to include, if one is going to include such a note at all - is absolutely lovely, capturing the beauty of the farm in question, and the loving routine of the farm family being depicted. I definitely plan to track down more of her work, and will look out for future publications from Doyle as well. Recommended to picture-book readers looking for stories featuring farms, or about the coming of winter. show less

A different type of bedtime book, this one is about preparing for a farm's winter hibernation. Gentle illustrations (they remind me a bit of Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney) set the soothing sleepy tone.

Reviewed by Sally Kruger aka "Readingjunky" for TeensReadToo.com

Kit has lived her entire life on a Vermont dairy farm. Her life is one constant routine. It starts with the morning milking and chores and ends with the same at night. The only variety is her dancing.

Things change a bit the fall she turns fifteen. When a crazy kid in her high school science class takes out a knife and cuts another student, Kit's mother decides she's had it with public education. She pulls Kit from the high show more school and tells her she will be homeschooling from now on. But homeschooling for the daughter of busy farmers turns into Kit taking care of her own learning.

At first it seems like fun, but things get boring pretty quickly. Math means helping her mother with the farm accounting, science is helping with the chores and milking and listening to her father's schemes to increase revenue for the farm. She reads a lot and decides to keep working on the research she started at school for a project about bats that fascinates her. Physical education is, of course, her dance classes. One benefit of the homeschooling deal with her mother is that her dance classes increase to three times a week.

Being around her parents 24/7 doesn't always bring out the best in everyone. Kit is fairly certain that her mother tries to be as mean as possible by complaining and finding fault in everything. Her father attempts to calm the waters between mother and daughter, but often the only escape Kit can find is heading down to her grandfather's trailer or going up into the haymow to dance away the stress.

ACCORDING TO KIT by Eugenie Doyle is the story of one year in the life of a young girl whose dreams of an exciting future don't fit with her dairy farm lifestyle. As her day-to-day story unfolds, readers get to know Kit and will admire her determination to make her dreams of dancing as important to her mother as they are to her. show less