Dream Animals

August 12, 2013
A boy dreams that his teddy bear gets supersized and carries him off to a magical kitchen, where he plays chef to Humpty Dumpy, a robot, and a friendly ogre. A girl snuggles with a stuffed narwhal and soon she is “Beneath the seven seas,” attending a tea party with mermaids. “Whatever dream you visit/ When night replaces day,/ Your furred, or finned, or feathered friend/ Will surely know the way,” writes Martin (Oddfellow’s Orphanage), who runs the popular Black Apple store on Etsy. The minimalist ink-sketched bedrooms of each dreamer give way to luxuriant fairy-tale images rendered in dense, subtly radiant colors, which are reminiscent of classic European illustration (a scene in an “elfin hollow,” in which the young dreamer is crowned with a garland during a sort of jamboree, is particularly Germanic in mood). Martin’s rhymes are literal and don’t make much of an impression, but her pictures, which skirt sentimentality despite their cherubic aesthetic, will take firm grip of readers’ imaginations as they make their own ways to dreamland. Ages 2–5. Agent: Brenda Bowen, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

December 15, 2013
Preschool-K You only have to close your eyes / And when you snuggle in . . . / You'll be carried to your dream tonight / On wing or paw or fin. As children cuddle up with their special stuffed animal in their cozy beds, dreams come to carry them off on adventures. One boy's bear takes him to bake fabulous pastries to serve to some peculiar fairy tale friends. A girl encircled by fireflies rides a red fox to a magical forest, where she plays the banjo with an elf orchestra hidden in an underground hollow. Whether taking tea with mermaids in pale green waters, flying over a prehistoric world on a winged bicycle, or painting the stars while resting on the moon, these dreams suggest delightful and fantastical experiences. Martin sketches the sleeping children in black-and-white and renders the enchanting scenes of their dreams in vivid color. A sweet and lyrical bedtime story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014
"And when you snuggle in... / You'll be carried to your dream tonight / On wing or paw or fin." In this bedtime treasure, sleeping children take flight with his or her dream animal to whimsical settings. Soothing rhyming text pulls the reader through the lushly rendered, celestial dreamscapes, which are as likely to appeal to nostalgic adults as to sleepy children.

(Copyright 2014 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)