All My Friends Are Fast Asleep

July 10, 2017
Children’s musician Weinstone follows Music Class Today! with another song as picture book; guitar chords and a link to a free download are included. The hero, a brown-skinned boy with a bad case of insomnia, leaves his cozy bedroom, ventures outdoors carrying a lantern-bright white pillow (which matches the whites of his very open eyes), and looks for a sleep role model in the animal world. “So on I go to find a place to lay my weary head/ Perhaps I’ll find a friend or two to help me up ahead,” reads the refrain. Le Huche (With Dad, It’s Like That) creates a nighttime landscape that’s both pretty and benign, rendered in crisp lines and rich hues of teal, navy, and purple. The eight featured animals run the gamut (whale, mole, bat, etc.) and are joined by some bemused nocturnal onlookers (an owl, a fox, some rabbits). The story ends just as it should, with the hero re-embracing human sleeping habits, and the text’s steady, lilting repetition may have some readers doing so, too. Ages 2–6. Author’s agent: Erica Rand Silverman, Stimola Literary Studio. Illustrator’s agent: Kirsten Hall, Catbird Agency.

June 1, 2017
A little black boy who has trouble falling asleep decides to find out how other animal friends get comfortable.He leaves his rumpled bed and ventures out to discover that: a bat sleeps upside down in a cave, a horse dozes standing up, a whale slumbers on the gently rolling waves, a lark beds down in a nest, the mole snuggles in a hole, a frog stays on a log, a seal reclines on the rocks, and more. Yet all of these positions and places are inappropriate for a little boy. So back in bed and tuckered out from exploring, the boy finally nods off. Le Huche's flat, boldly hued illustrations move the boy from his moonlit, dark azure bedroom filled with toys, books, his art, stuffed animals, and musical instruments through his nighttime journey, which is rendered in the opaque blues and greens of darkness. Looking closely, readers can see that this boy has not gone all that far, as the animals he peeks in on are all counterparts of the familiar animal characters in his room. The rhyming text is written as a song with a repetitive refrain in which the child imagines playing the part of the various creatures ("A whale I'll be, I say to me, / but still I cannot sleep") before he mentally returns to his bedroom, now awash in the purple hue of deep sleep. An addendum includes lyrics with guitar chords. Weinstone, a former punk rocker and founder of the preschool music program Music for Aardvarks and Other Mammals, has created a soothing piece for little bedtime resisters. (Picture book. 3-5)

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