Mother's Song: A Lullaby Book

This tender, lyrical song is an outpouring of a young mother’s love for her baby. She compares her little one to every good thing, from roses and pearls to the queen herself, in lovely, simple verses. In the charming subtext created by artist Elizabeth Sayles, the setting is an idyllic twilight world, where fairies and sprites play among the flowers and craft an exquisite gift for the sleeping mother and child.
Collected in the English countryside by 19th-century folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, the words of the lullaby have come down to us without music. A melody has been composed for this book and appears with simple piano accompaniment following the text. Spoken or sung, Mother’s Song is a romantic rhapsody that goes straight to the listener’s heart.

Publishers Weekly

An adaptation of an old West Country lullaby, Greene's (Billy Beg and His Bull) text has a lovely, crooning lilt. Its verses extol how the child's wonderfulness either equals or excels the wonders of nature: "There's not a star that shines on high/ Is brighter than my baby's eye." These cozy sentiments get a shot of steroids in the unusual, anthem-like final verse, in which the mother is allowed a soaring, possibly rousing wrap-up: "Ten thousand parks where the deer run/ Ten thousand roses in the sun,/ Ten thousand pearls beneath the sea/ My babe more precious is to me." Working in velvety pastels, Sayles (I Already Know I Love You) imagines a mother and her child in a garden idyll; tiny fairies frolic around the pair, secretly preparing crowns of flowers and pearls for the lucky humans (who receive them unaware in a gatefold spread at the end). And while the romantically evoked forest landscape, complete with lily pond, and the dreamy palette of twilight blues and greens extend the maternal fantasy, the winged fairies come across as diminutive domestic help, soothing rather than startling. Arrestingly, Sayles uses the fairies to modulate the song's hyperbole, countering the climactic buildup of the text with her tranquil visual storytelling. Ages up to 3. (Mar.)

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