While You Were Napping by Jenny Offill (review)

FOMO (fear of missing out) may be an adult-created term, but it’s a kid-central anxiety, and this comic piece of literary torture strikes right at its heart with an account by an older sister of all the wonderful things her little brother missed during enforced naptime. The disingenuously helpful sister relates to the newly awakened boy the series of miraculous and delightful events that all the other kids just enjoyed: driving bulldozers, digging up dinosaur bones, dining with robots on French-fry sandwiches (“and no one made us say the magic word or asked us to stop drinking the ketchup”). Then, of course, there were the fireworks (and the subsequent fire), the pirate invasion, and the moon journey with the astronauts—but “you slept right through it.” Offill spins the account perfectly, with the narrator exquisitely crafting the lie for maximum envy, dropping in new developments with devastating casualness (“Just then the astronauts arrived in their rocket ship to take everyone to the moon”), and repeatedly needling the napper about how much he’d have enjoyed it (the robots brought his favorite kind of cotton candy). Blitt’s illustrations, slender, squirrely lines with daubs of pale watercolor, work best close up, where the caricaturesque drafting (there’s an amusing doll-like weirdness to the kids’ oversized heads) and vignettish subdramas are easily perusable. Percussive close-focus intervals add punctuation, while the broader landscapes are like a wonderful febrile delirium, with kids going every which way as they sow the seeds of destruction and adventure at odd, sometimes literally skewed angles. The brazen over-the-topness leavens the taunting with pure ridiculousness, but there’s still enough bite to make this absolutely hilarious, especially to older sibs.