Everybody Sleeps (But Not Fred).
By Josh Schneider. Clarion. $16.99.
Bob and Flo. By Rebecca
Ashdown. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.
Sometimes it takes just a
small tweak to make a seemingly ordinary character into an unusual one, and his
or her adventures into extra-special fun for young readers – or even
pre-readers. Josh Schneider’s Everybody
Sleeps (But Not Fred) seems on the surface to be an ordinary enough bedtime
book about a little boy who has trouble falling asleep but who, eventually,
does. However, that straightforward story is told in a way that makes the book,
and the boy, offbeat and pleasantly unusual. First of all, everyone else in the
book is an animal, so the various able-to-sleep characters include chickens
(one of them apparently mechanical), monkeys (in ballerina costumes), sheep
(one wearing an accountant’s traditional eyeshade and using a calculator to,
you know, count sheep), an anteater (sitting at a table at a French café
specializing in ants), and so forth. Second of all, the reason Fred cannot
sleep is far out of the ordinary: he is determined to get through a to-do list,
and not just any to-do list. His includes
breaking the world shouting record, testing his horn collection (which includes
an alphorn so big and loud that it awakens whales sleeping peacefully in the
ocean), hunting the Sasquatch (by checking out the various monsters scattered
in beds in a room where bats hang from the rafters while a snake snoozes and a
toucan – which reappears throughout the book – somehow manages to sleep hanging
upside-down, like the bats). The funniest concept of all here is a
self-referential one involving books just like this. It is about the way
parents usually gets kids to sleep: “Having read a book or three,/ parents turn
to poetry,/ reading from a book so boring,/ children soon are prone and
snoring.” And sure enough, after this particular bit of poetic whimsy, Fred is
discovered (by one of the monkey ballerinas) to have fallen asleep – and
Schneider warns readers to close the book softly so Fred doesn’t wake up and
start his to-do list all over again. Parents who choose this as bedtime reading
should be prepared, at this point, for children to insist on slamming the book
closed very loudly. Repeat as necessary.
In Rebecca Ashdown’s Bob and Flo, there is also a simple and
straightforward story: two preschoolers meet and become friends. That is the
whole tale – but what sets it apart from many other books with the same plot is
that these preschoolers are penguins. Flo wears a bow atop her head, and Bob
wears – well, nothing at first, but he does admire the bucket in which Flo has
brought her lunch (fish, of course). And soon, as Flo is busy painting, she
notices that her bucket is missing and the fish are all over the floor. So Flo
goes on a bucket quest, which is neither long-lasting nor difficult: Bob is
wearing it on his head, then standing on it to build a tower of blocks, then
using it to build sand castles, and then turning it into a drum. Instead of
getting angry, upset or possessive, Flo uses the bucket to help Bob, who gets
stuck at the top of the slide: she fills the bucket with water and uses it to
wash him down the slide. By the end of the day, Bob is wearing the bucket to go
home, and Flo is calling it “our bucket” and making plans for the next day – a
sweet ending to a nicely conceived book whose very simple drawings only look
like ones that young children might themselves make: it takes skill to produce
work that looks so simplistic and naïve, just as it takes skill to turn a
perfectly ordinary story into one whose characters make it special.
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