While You Are Sleeping

October 15, 2017
Many visual stories play out during the night, between the time that a child falls asleep and then awakens. This winner of the 2015 Silent Book Contest at the Bologna Book Fair may be wordless, but it overflows with stories. It demands that its viewers take their time going through the pages--and then going through them again. The beginning is simple: a light-skinned child falls asleep as an adult woman reads from a book whose cover sports stylized, anthropomorphic animals cavorting around a bonfire. Over several successive pages, the scene pans steadily outward--as with a wide-lens camera--so viewers see the child's home situated in an urban neighborhood, and then more and more of that neighborhood. Against a backdrop of a starry sky, windows and rooftops of buildings reveal the child's caregivers embracing, a nurse and patients in a hospital, an artist at an easel, and much more. As the angle widens, more characters emerge, and the initial stories continue. Art emerges on the easel; a crying baby finally sleeps; creatures resembling the bedtime book's characters leave the city and paddle away on a long boat whose brilliant orange-and-gold pattern matches the sleeping child's bedspread. Before the sophisticated, mixed-media artwork returns to the cityscapes, there are several joyous, vividly colored pages showing the creatures celebrating the night and the ensuing daybreak. Alluring, wordless enchantment. (Picture book. 4-9)

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Starred review from October 30, 2017
Painted in brilliant folk-art hues, Argentinian illustrator Johnson’s wordless story starts with a view through a window. Inside, a mother reads to her golden-haired son, then tiptoes away after he falls asleep. Now the view pulls back: the boy’s parents share wine downstairs, a girl cycles by, and a jaguar and a deer play music together on a nearby rooftop. The view again widens to reveal more buildings—the city night is alive with activity, and the two brightly colored animals are joined by four more. (Observant readers may have spotted them earlier in the story.) They strike out across a placid sea in a red dugout and head for a primeval wilderness, where they light torches and make a bonfire in the dark. At last their dancing makes the bonfire rise up into the sky: it’s the morning sun. Back in the city, the boy awakens. The story’s easy slide from reality to myth and back again recalls the magical realism of authors like García Márquez—and more stories are hinted at in the windows that fill the boy’s neighborhood. Ages 3–5.