Goodnight Everyone

What’s it about?

The story.

As the sun goes down, the forest animals begin to yawn. The bears yawn. The hedgehogs yawn. The mice yawn. One by one they drift toward sleep, nestling into dens and burrows and nests as the forest gets darker, warmer, and quieter. Only little bear is still awake. He is not sleepy. He is definitely not sleepy. Chris Haughton builds this as a cumulative, hypnotic bedtime book: the colours deepen across pages, the language gets quieter and slower, and the comic thread of little bear's cheerful resistance gives children permission to find their own tiredness funny. The final pages are very dark and very still, ideal for a child who needs permission to stop being awake. The visual reading load is the lowest of any Haughton book; the images are large enough for children of 12 months to follow without guidance, and the repetitive structure means the text is effectively memorised after two readings. The go-to recommendation for parents who need a reliable winding-down tool, and one of the very few picture books that reliably induces actual sleepiness in the reading child.