So Sleepy Story (review)

It's a sleepy world indeed in Caldecott Medalist Shulevitz's new picture book, or at least at first, when a "sleepy sleepy boy in a sleepy sleepy bed" dozes amid a panoply of slumbering housewares. When a strain of music floats through the window and gets increasingly louder, however, the house begins to stir, with dancing dishes, waking cat, and calling cuckoo clock awakening the boy; after an interval of wee-hour festivity, the music wafts away and boy and house settle back down to sleep. The text's constant reiteration of "sleepy" and careful patterning ensures that even the wakeful interlude isn't too electrifying for bed-bound listeners; this is just a bedtime book that slyly spirals its audience down rather than directly tucking them in. The art obligingly aids and abets, with everything personified in the moody, moony world: cabinet fronts, curtains, and windowsill cactus are as solidly conked out as the boy and cat. The music-induced frolic changes the palette from cool slates to warm, slant-shadowed ochres suggestive of incandescent light piercing the gloom; the revelry culminates in a four-page wordless sequence of hearty partying and incipient romance of furniture and china amid dancing musical notes (from which the boy is, rather oddly, absent, so viewers may wonder what he's getting up to while all this goes on). Audiences will adore the rampant yet benevolent animism that essentially turns the world into a toy collection, and they might even hit the sack earlier in the hopes of participating in their own nighttime house party.