Hello Sleep

Via cushiony round shapes, handsome landscapes, and colors that melt together, Parc’s English-language debut creates an extraordinary visual lullaby built around a slumber-granting figure’s nightly rounds. A wakeful child with two wide-open eyes snuggles into bed beside a puff-like feline as text reads, “Hello, Sleep! It’s me. Remember? We’re supposed to get together.” A spread later, blue-eyed Sleep, who sports a black full-body suit and a magic wand, is shown dutifully visiting individuals worldwide, “from the stork to the earthworm.” Sleep works hard, leaving trails of “ZZZ”s floating from the residents of extraordinary geometric dreamscapes, but the being never gets any shut-eye. Questioning the arrangement and determined to rest, Sleep takes a rigid prone form that becomes a funny visual motif as the figure auditions an array of potential snooze spots—a dandelion puff, Santa’s beard, a bulging sack of garbage, and “the Amazon’s sultry current.” When Sleep discovers the soporific power of a purring white cat, whose sound is “like a little train going by, ever so quietly,” both Sleep and the child at last drift off with their feline companions. It’s a rare bedtime picture book that embodies the very feeling it describes: that twilight state in which rollicking consciousness surrenders to dreams. Ages 5–9. (Apr.)