Along with snippets of basic natural science, this animal portrait gallery showcases a set of handsome painted-paper collage scenes, shot against plain white backgrounds, and depicting various wild mothers tenderly regarding sleeping offspring. The text, just a single sentence per spread, is a nearly superfluous set of descriptive captions: “Baby Skunk sleeps curled up in a woodpile by the barn . . . Baby Stingray sleeps buried under sand in the sea,” and so on, until the comfortably predictable, “But the wildest baby of them all sleeps cuddled up in my house!” Though Siomades’s constructs are more sophisticated than those of Eric Carle or Ellen Stoll Walsh, very young viewers will have no trouble focusing on the various mothers’ large-eyed faces, and the loving expressions thereon, in this brief sleepy-time read. (Picture book. 2-5)
