Much as I’d like to accept this as an entertaining bedtime story, I can’t shake the very strong feeling that there’s something ugly and frightening about this picture book. With its underlying themes of power and control, its reprimand of young females, its mob mentality, and its unsatisfactory resolution, Bedtime Ba-a-a-lk doesn’t strike me as the “wise and witty” story of “negotiation, compromise and … gentle laughter” its book flap extols.

About an end-of-day standoff, Bedtime Ba-a-a-lk pits a child who’s ready for bed and eager to sleep against the imaginary sheep she’s accustomed to counting each night. The character who challenges the child’s polite request for the sheep to begin their nightly leaping is a cantankerous elderly monocled ram, who’s pictured nightmarishly larger than the child and who becomes increasingly belligerent.

Illustrator Kristi Frost uses body language, including butting heads, to demonstrate that the child is holding her own against the ranting ram. The child’s self-satisfied smirk at the story’s end lets readers know she has bested him. Yet the victory rings hollow. Rather than winning through wit or wisdom or compassion, the child’s achievement is one of brute force. She, in effect, annihilates the troublesome ram and his companions by using her exclusive power to conjure them away and replace them with another imaginary but more amenable flock.

While first-time author Rukhsana Khan’s plot is fresh, the voice and style of her story delivery raise some questions. Bedtime Ba-a-a-lk opens almost poetically with lyrical language, phrasing and pacing, immediately creating an effective sleepytime mood. What’s unclear is whose voice it represents – a narrator’s or the pictured child? The vocabulary argues for an adult narrator, but the remainder of the story suggests the child. Throughout the story, occasional glimmers, in the form of nicely rhymed couplets, recall the promise of the story’s poetic opening and will cause read-aloud readers especially to wish that the dialogue and narration overall had more in common with the book’s beginning.

Although Frost’s bright lively cartoon-like pictures will appeal to children, attentive readers will detect a major discrepancy between the text and pictures. The sheeps’ refusal to leap over a fence is the crux of the story, but Frost places a carnival the child creates for the sheep on the far, not the near, side of the fence. Accordingly, all the sheep shown at the carnival have had to cross the fence to get to it, effectively undermining the story’s plot. Bedtime Ba-a-a-lk serves as a valuable reminder that even picture books deserve close scrutiny and thoughtful consideration.