SEVEN STORIES

Playing it (more or less) straight in the text but not in the pictures, Briant chronicles a young insomniac’s efforts to get to sleep, stymied by noises all around, from bumps and shrieks in adjoining apartments, to voices in the hallway and commotions down in the street. The ruckus is created by a set of unusual but familiar fellow residents, from a giant searching for his goose and three irritated bears catching an interloper in one of their beds, to a lovely party-goer losing a slipper as she runs down the front steps and a raggedly dressed wolf trying to entice a trio of piglets to come out and play. Briant creates a simply drawn setting and a multiethnic (not to mention multi-species) cast for this nighttime urban symphony—from which the wakeful narrator finally finds surcease by pulling a pea out from beneath her mattress: “Then I turned over once, turned over twice. And fell fast asleep.” A restful alternative to the likes of Jerome & Jarrett Pumphrey’s Creepy Things Are Scaring Me (2003), illus by Rosanne Litzinger. (Picture book. 5-7)