cover image Sleepy Book

Sleepy Book

Charlotte Zolotow. HarperCollins Publishers, $14 (32pp) ISBN 978-0-06-026967-8

This reissued, newly illustrated version of Zolotow's nighttime book is filled with gentle, pastel drawings of sleeping animals, insects and birds. The litany is like a lullaby: ``Crickets sleep in the long meadow grass and look like the grass itselfthey are so still,'' and ``the snowy crane sleeps standing on one long leg like a flower on its stem.'' But the best is saved for last as two children ``sleep warm under their blankets in their beds.'' On each spread, Plume (The Bremen Town Musicians) counters full-page illustrations with strikingly designed borders around the text. The drawing of a collie sleeping at the feet of his mistress is opposite a border of bones and paw prints; the text about seals that ``sleep with their flippers flat against blocks of ice'' is embellished with fish, seabirds and intricate snowflakes floating on lavender and blue chips of sky. Ages 4-8. (June)