Chris, Haughton

Clever book design adds a little something extra to this bedtime book, illustrated with Haughton's signature blocky, digital illustrations, and rendered in a jewel-toned palette. Front and back inky-blue flyleaves depict the solar system, with tiny silhouetted pictures of the animals from the book sitting on top of the Earth. In the front they are illuminated by the sun, while in the back their hemisphere is in darkness, echoing how night falls in the story. Southern and Northern constellations adorn the endpapers. On the half-title page, a wide-awake cub looks at a yawning big bear. Then the book begins with several woodland animals, eyes at half-mast, while the same little wide-awake bear looks on: "The sun is going down and everyone is sleepy." Subsequent pages are trimmed at the right side to offer a tiered progression (narrow to less narrow) of three page-turns telling readers how very sleepy the mice, hares, and deer are, all leading up to the big bear's "GREAT, BIG STRETCH." But the little bear, with those great big eyes, is not sleepy. Alas, the cub can find no playmates among the drowsy animals and eventually exhausts itself searching for some. A return home to the big bear provides cozy closure for the little bear, and for the rest of the animals, too, as closing illustrations zoom out for the "goodnight everyone" ending: "The moon is high and everyone is fast asleep." megan dowd lambert