Little Nina will not go to bed. Not when the adults are having so much fun in the other room without her! Before her exasperated parents can catch up, Nina escapes her bedroom and races through the house, sampling cakes and just generally stirring up trouble. With Nina on the loose, a cordial family party becomes a wild good time, as her aunts and uncles join in the riotous fun. Finally it’s time for the guests to leave, and it is bedtime at last—not just for Nina, but for the entire exhausted family.
Illustrated with stylishly appealing three-color art, this is a loving, funny portrait of family life—and of what bedtime is often really like.
Tsarfati's lively illustrations fill in Smith's open-ended rhyming couplets by providing witty visual punch lines and capture Nina's boundless energy and impish antics with a minimal color palette. They are New Yorker-stylish, depicting a white family that looks delightfully real, pot bellies and all. A delightful tale for young readers who don't want to go to bed. * Kirkus *
