10 Minutes Till Bedtime
by Peggy Rathmann (Author)
At One Hoppin' Place, the countdown to bedtime is about to begin when a family of hamsters -- a mother and father with nine kids and a baby all wearing numbered striped jerseys -- arrive at the front door.
"All aboard!" the child's pet hamster, dressed as a tour guide, shouts, directing them to his bus. It's off to the kitchen for a snack, to the bathroom for toothbrushing, to the bedroom for a story. And just as the child begins to read, the tour guide looks out the window and shouts, "More coming!"
Busloads and carloads of vacationing hamsters stream through the front door, and the escapades accelerate from one action-packed page to the next, as the countdown continues.
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Publishers Weekly
Caldecott Medalist Rathmann (Officer Buckle and Gloria) builds a captivating series of mini-plots from a basic countdown premise with few words and abundant action. A child—who could be a girl or boy—plays with an energetic hamster family with just 10 minutes to go before she's tucked into bed. As the child's father idly reads the newspaper and clocks the passing time ("9 minutes till bedtime"), a rotund hamster in a blue conductor's uniform echoes each announcement with a tiny megaphone. Meanwhile, the hamster parents and their 10 active offspring, distinguishable by numbered yellow-and-red striped jerseys, frolic throughout the house. Rathmann endows each with a distinctive personality: Numbers 3 and 4 are twins, 8 shows only its rear end and stroller-bound toddler 10 declares "eat" and "more!" After additional golden-brown rodents arrive (in Goodnight Gorilla fashion) at the front door (raising the count to well above 50), the child reads this very book to a vast audience, takes a bath surrounded by furry beachgoers (and lotion, ants and sunglasses galore), then hurries through other pre-bed rituals before a final cry of "Bedtime!" Every engrossing illustration provides an exercise in numerals and Where's Waldo?-style concentration; die-hard fans will not only count Gorilla among the throngs, but Officer Buckle opens and closes the show, and young readers will note Rathmann's return to Napville for this nocturnal adventure. If Rathmann has her way, young slumberers will be counting hamsters, not sheep, as they drift off to sleep. Ages 2-6. (Sept.)
Copyright 2004 Publishers Weekly Used with permission.
School Library Journal
PreS-Gr 2-Tales about stalling bedtime abound but none wag more cleverly than Rathmann's humorous picture book. The countdown begins for the spiky-haired, bunny-slippered boy who lives at 1 Hoppin Place when his father announces, "10 minutes till bedtime." Suddenly, a family of hamsters, all decked out in numbered jerseys, arrive at the door and are greeted by a hamster tour guide (the child's pet), who shouts, "All aboard!" As the boy's oblivious, newspaper-reading father issues a minute-by-minute countdown, the tour bus heads to the kitchen for a snack, stops in the bathroom for cleaning up, and ends up in the bedroom for a story. Just as the boy begins to read, the tour guide shouts, "More coming!" Hordes of vacationing hamsters arrive in a variety of vehicles, and the frenzied pages overflow with a series of amusing sideshows. Finally, the child shouts, "Bedtime!" and everyone clears out before his father's goodnight kiss. Picture a combination of Rathmann's Officer Buckle and Gloria (Putnam, 1995)-both of whom make cameo appearances-and Martin Handford's Where's Waldo? (Candlewick, 1997) and that conveys the zaniness, style, and ingenuity at play here. Children will pore over the comical details and follow closely the antics of the numbered hamsters, each one with a personality of its own. Every aspect of page design adds to the fun, including the endpapers that feature hamster family photos. Rathmann has another hit, one that will extend years of bedtime deadlines, but who's counting?-Julie Cummins, New York Public Library
Copyright 2004 School Library Journal Used with permission.
Review quotes
"In the summer we lolled in plastic wading pools guzzling Kool-Aid. In the winter we sculpted giant snow animals. It was a good life."
Ms. Rathmann graduated from Mounds View High School in New Brighton, Minnesota, then attended colleges everywhere, changing her major repeatedly. She eventually earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of Minnesota.
"I wanted to teach sign language to gorillas, but after taking a class in signing, I realized what I'd rather do was draw pictures of gorillas."
Ms. Rathmann studied commercial art at the American Academy in Chicago, fine art at the Atelier Lack in Minneapolis, and children's-book writing and illustration at the Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles.
"I spent the first three weeks of my writing class at Otis Parsons filching characters from my classmates' stories. Finally, the teacher convinced me that even a beginning writer can create an original character if the character is driven by the writer's most secret weirdness. Eureka! A little girl with a passion for plagiarism! I didn't want anyone to know it was me, so I made the character look like my sister."
The resulting book, Ruby the Copycat, earned Ms. Rathmann the "Most Promising New Author" distinction in Publishers Weekly's 1991 annual Cuffie Awards. In 1992 she illustrated Bootsie Barker Bites for Barbara Bottner, her teacher at Otis Parsons.
A homework assignment produced an almost wordless story, Good Night, Gorilla, inspired by a childhood memory.
"When I was little, the highlight of the summer was running barefoot through the grass, in the dark, screaming. We played kick-the-can, and three-times-around-the-house, and sometimes we just stood staring into other people's picture windows, wondering what it would be like to go home to someone else's house."
That story, however, was only nineteen pages long, and everyone agreed that the ending was a dud. Two years and ten endings later, Good Night, Gorilla was published and recognized as an ALA Notable Children's Book for 1994.
The recipient of the 1996 Caldecott Medal, Officer Buckle and Gloria, is the story of a school safety officer upstaged by his canine partner.
"We have a videotape of my mother chatting in the dining room while, unnoticed by her or the cameraman, the dog is licking every poached egg on the buffet. The next scene shows the whole family at the breakfast table, complimenting my mother on the delicious poached eggs. The dog, of course, is pretending not to know what a poached egg is. The first time we watched that tape we were so shocked, we couldn't stop laughing. I suspect that videotape had a big influence on my choice of subject matter."
Ms. Rathmann lives and works in San Francisco, in an apartment she shares with her husband, John Wick, and a very funny bunch of ants.
copyright (c) 2000 by Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
JUV002180 - Juvenile Fiction | Animals | Mice, Hamsters, Guinea Pigs, etc.
Hamsters
