Prayer for a Child
by Elizabeth Orton Jones
Summary
A young girl kneels for a bedtime prayer that blesses the ordinary parts of her day, her toy animals, her friends near and far, the birds outside her window, the people who love her, working through a simple list a child could plausibly compose herself rather than a formal liturgical prayer borrowed from an adult service. Rachel Field wrote the spare verse, and Elizabeth Orton Jones illustrated each line with soft, closely observed drawings of the girl at the close of her day, her room, her toys, her small rituals of getting ready for sleep, rendered in a gentle, muted palette suited to the hour the book describes.
It is a short book meant to be read at exactly the moment it depicts, the last few minutes before a child falls asleep, and its quiet, repetitive structure, blessing one thing and then the next, works as well as an actual bedtime ritual as it does as a story to be followed for plot. There is essentially no incident to track, which makes it unusual among Caldecott winners but exactly suited to its purpose: a parent reading it aloud is not building suspense but winding a child down, and the book's slow, list like rhythm does that work reliably even on the hundredth reading.
Field died in 1942, two years before the book appeared, and the prayer's private, domestic feel is legible in how specific and unshowy its list of blessings stays; it never reaches for a single grand statement, only the small concrete comforts of one particular child's evening, which is exactly what Kirkus Reviews meant in calling it, simply, a beautiful piece of bookmaking.
Historical Context & Significance
Prayer for a Child won the 1945 Caldecott Medal for a book The Macmillan Company published in 1944. That year's runners up were Tasha Tudor's Mother Goose, Marie Hall Ets's In the Forest, Marguerite de Angeli's Yonie Wondernose and Kate Seredy's The Christmas Anna Angel.
The New York Times praised the finished book at the time, writing that the pictures and the prayer speak to a child in a child's own language while remaining, in the paper's words, beautiful, moving and deeply satisfying for older readers too. Field, already an established author for children and adults, did not illustrate the book herself, and Jones went on to a long career in children's illustration beyond this single medal. The book was later reissued by Simon & Schuster after Macmillan's original edition, evidence of a steady rather than spectacular readership across decades, the kind that keeps a quiet bedtime book in print without ever making it a widely famous title outside families who specifically seek out prayer books for children.