While you're asleep

"The Earth / slowly spins, / light fades away. / You're ready for sleep / at the end of the day." Soothing blue and gold illustrations in soft acrylic gouache, watercolor, and colored pencil lull listeners into this nifty piece of metafiction that starts as a bedtime story, swerves into a lesson on nocturnal animals, and then dives straight into weird. The gentle rhyming text finds bunnies, deer, and puppies asleep, but then there's the raccoon. "Uh, that raccoon's awake?" The unnamed omniscient narrator tries to veer back to slumber, but the raccoon and friends are busy pulling chicken bones out of trash cans. On subsequent page-turns, sleeping squirrels, bees, and bears contrast with wide-awake skunks tiptoeing, crickets chirping, and fireflies flickering. When the narrator happens upon some trout, the fourth wall comes tumbling down: "I can't think of a rhyme. / Are these fish asleep? / They must be, but the whole eyes-wide-open thing is very confusing." Finally, the narrator decides to close their own eyes -- "for a moment to think" -- and readers are treated to a dream about bats in top hats, opossums painting, and other animals doing all manner of unlikely things. Kastner skillfully plays with readers' expectations and format conventions, creating a story that is both funny and thought provoking. Adrienne L. PettinelliMarch/April 2024 p.69 (c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

If you knew what was happening while you were fast asleep, you'd wake up right away. This enjoyable picture book begins as a typically hushed, lull-your-kid-to-sleep rhyming tale replete with cute animals settling down. It quickly turns into a vehicle for the author's witty commentaries on less sedate nighttime doings--nocturnal creatures getting up to busy hijinks in the night. Raccoons raid trash cans, skunks tiptoe through the night, and crickets sing their hearts out. The author interrupts the verse to comment on what's going on--that skunk is probably just making her way to bed, and those crickets are singing lullabies before going to sleep…right? Near the end, she imagines what several critters might get up to at night: Perhaps the bats don fancy clothes, and the fox prepares a lavish dinner. But who knows? Most of us are snoozing, so we don't really know, do we? This isn't your ordinary sleepy-time picture book, but it's fun and may help kids relate to and dream about other sleepers. The contrast between the factual and fanciful material may confuse some readers, though. Grown-ups, beware: If youngsters imagine exciting adventures occurring while they're supposed to be falling asleep, uh-oh…The illustrations, rendered in acrylic gouache, watercolor, and colored pencil and adjusted digitally, are delightful. Captivating musings on what happens when we drift off for the night. (Picture book. 4-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.