GOOD NIGHT, EARTH

Inventive book design and shifting perspectives add cozy surprises to this bedtime snoozer, originally published in Scandinavia.

“Little chimp should be asleep by now. / Mama has sung and played 73 songs / on her ukulele.” Turning half pages that act like blankets being pulled up (or down), drowsy young nappers join a family of extraterrestrials watching from very far away as various animals and animal parents go through simple or strenuous bedtime routines—or, in the case of a deceptively quiescent tarsier, get ready to leap into an all-night frolic. All (aliens included) turn out to be surrogates for Sweetie Pie, a human child, and her stuffies reluctantly snuggling down at long last…between a pair of weary parents. In Hasan-Rokem’s translation from the Swedish, the text is poetic, sly, and funny: “Look there, in the leaves! A little sloth in a hammock! / Shhh! Both she and the hammock are asleep, as usual.” Readers will see from the illustration that the “hammock” is the little sloth’s parent. Bondestam depicts human figures with beige skin, which allows some latitude for ethnic identification. Along with adding sly anthropomorphic touches to the rest of the cast, she caps the nighttime scenes with one final one of a comically frazzled family of owls barely getting through a sunrise supper of croissants and hot chocolate before collapsing. Parents of younger children will definitely relate.

A droll and imaginative addition to the crepuscular corpus.