Bedtime Stories

Written and Illustrated by Betsy Wolff Frey. Available now. Click to order.

Children sometimes need help getting to sleep.

Lost Civilization Bedtime Stories begin by distracting the child from the events of the day. The stories stimulate the imagination with a description of a world quite different from the ordinary world. There is often an adventure in the story. All stories end on a happy note, often with the characters falling into an exhausted, contented sleep. One hopes that the child who hears the story is left thinking about the different world in the story, with its sleepy ending.

The stories originated from improvised storytelling when putting children to bed. When the stories were later put on paper, the author reports she was horrified to discover that every few sentences screamed for a fresh page with an illustration. Readers might question whether the right side of the author’s brain was up to the illustration task; the author prefers to view her pictures as classic naive art, with its markedly childlike style.