LITTLE CLOUD LAMB

A story about death that’s far less likely to soothe young readers than confuse and creep them out. Lambkin is born covered in puffy cloud instead of fleece, making him an occasional source of summer thundershowers. As the lamb’s differences make him an outsider to the other sheep, he sits alone having silent conversations with nature while “something inside him grew and grew”—which is not a reference to cancer, because whatever it is makes him stronger, and afterward he “played in a different way because he felt it was more creative and more artistic.” The other sheep from time to time draw bedtime duty, jumping over fences to lull humans to sleep, and seeing how tired it makes them, he resolves to help people sleep in a different way. Instead of growing up, though, he dies and leaves behind a neatly wrapped skein of yarn; he fulfills his destiny by floating off into the sky to visit wakeful children at night to “rest on their eyes like cotton wool, slowly closing them.” Idyllic watercolor scenes of stylized flowers or wide-eyed sheep wandering over grassy hills and leaping in the dreams of sleepy human figures fail to make this well-intentioned effort any less discomfiting. (Picture book. 6-8)