Equally suitable for nodding off and nature study.
Just like drowsy young readers, animals have their own individual sleep and pre-sleep behaviors.
Capped by glimpses through apartment windows of light and dark-skinned children crawling into bed and nodding off, this gently soporific survey joins 12 animals in or on the way to slumberland. Dogs, for instance, like to lick their paws and turn in circles before hunkering down, chimpanzees build comfy nests in trees, and ducks and geese tuck their bills into their feathers. Dolphins rest each half of their brains separately, worker ants take many short naps (queens, on the other hand, can rest nine hours at a time), sea otters hold each other’s paws or wrap their bodies in seaweed to keep from drifting, and bats sleep upside down. Some lines of text undulate in keeping with the pictures’ gentle visual flow. Questions that Lerwill slips into each scene—“What do you do before you get into bed?” “What makes your bed comfortable?”—are calculated to put readers into quietly reflective moods. If the sonorous narrative and all the sleeping animals on view somehow fail to have their intended effect, the author closes with tried-and-true tips for getting a better night’s sleep.
Equally suitable for nodding off and nature study. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781536251487
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Norma Dixon’s Lowdown on Earthworms (2005) digs deeper into the subject, but this lays fertile groundwork for budding...
Beginning readers who tunnel through this upbeat first introduction will “dig” them too.
After an opening look at several kinds of worm (including the candy sort), McCloskey drills down to the nitty-gritty on earthworms. He describes how they help soil with their digging and “poop” (“EEW!”) and presents full-body inside and outside views with labeled parts. He also answers in the worms’ collective voice such questions as “Why do you come out after the rain?” and “How big is the biggest worm in the world?” that are posed by a multiethnic cast of intent young investigators in the cartoon illustrations. A persistent but frustrated bluebird’s “Yum, yum!!” and rejected invitations to lunch offer indirect references to worms as food sources, and reproductive details are likewise limited to oblique notes that worms have big families “born from cocoons.” Single scenes mingle with short sequences of panels in pictures that are drawn on brown paper bags for an appropriately earthy look.
Norma Dixon’s Lowdown on Earthworms (2005) digs deeper into the subject, but this lays fertile groundwork for budding naturalists. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-935179-80-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap.
Budding naturalists who dug We Dig Worms! (2015) will, well, coo over this similarly enlightening accolade.
A curmudgeonly park visitor’s “They’re RATS with wings!” sparks spirited rejoinders from a racially diverse flock of children wearing full-body bird outfits, who swoop down to deliver a mess of pigeon facts. Along with being related to the dodo, “rock doves” fly faster than a car, mate for life, have been crossbred into all sorts of “fancies,” inspired Pablo Picasso to name his daughter “Paloma” in their honor, can be eaten (“Tastes like chicken”), and, like penguins and flamingos, create “pigeon milk” in their crops for their hatchlings. Painted on light blue art paper—“the kind,” writes McCloskey in his afterword, “used by Picasso”—expertly depicted pigeons of diverse breeds common and fancy strut their stuff, with views of the children and other wild creatures, plus occasional helpful labels, interspersed. In the chastened parkgoer’s eyes, as in those of the newly independent readers to whom this is aimed, the often maligned birds are “wonderful.” Cue a fresh set of costumed children on the final page, gearing up to set him straight on squirrels.
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap. (Graphic informational early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935179-93-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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