SLOW DOWN, STANLEY

A unique sloth saves his community.

Sloths may be famously slow, but young Stanley, a brownish-gray sloth who wears an orange baseball cap, is the exception. Though it’s never explained why, he doesn’t sleep in the daytime, instead preferring to watch the goings-on of the forest and teach himself to leap from branch to branch like a monkey. When he shows his fellow young sloths the fun that can be had from jumping through the trees, the adults in the community get annoyed and make Stanley’s dad give his son a talking-to. Stanley argues that it can be helpful to swing through the trees and confidently tells his dad, “You’ll be proud of my jumping someday.” That day conveniently comes in the form of a forest fire, when Stanley’s skills save everyone. Much might have been lost in translation from the original Italian, with stiff, oddly constructed sentences and clunky descriptions that distract from what could have been a cute story about defying others’ assumptions. The bold, crude art, depicting smiling sloths and a hatted anteater, is the main selling point of this uneven tale.

Strictly for kids who can’t get enough of sloths.