Sweet Dreamers

Honestly, I bought this almost purely because of the artwork. My daughter and grandson were returning this to the library while I was with them, so I took a look, at my daughter’s offer. I was immediately entranced by the artwork. Not generally a fan of digital art, I was “converted” by these gorgeous “ethereal” images. I even bought a used copy with intentions to remove pages for framing, but have not yet been able to bring myself to “deconstructing” such a lovely book. Highly Recommended!

We had checked this book out from the library but my daughter liked it so much that I sought out our own copy. The art is simply amazing. I like the art so much in fact that I bought two of these books so that I could give away the second as a gift. The words are fine...but this book is more about the art.

Love this book. Some of the drawings( and I do mean drawings) made me go "ohhhh". Wonderful feelings to look at animals drawn like that. The purpose of the book is to teach kids something about animals sleeping habits. This book is done beautifully.

You know how they say robots are going to take our jobs someday? And you know how they say that if you can describe your job easily then yours will be the first to go? A bunch of hooey, right? But while I might pooh-pooh the coming robot apocalypse, I gotta give those binary-heads a bit of credit. 15 years ago when I was a young, scrappy librarian trying to make a name for herself in the world, I ascribed very much to the mindset that art created on computers was easy to identify. It had that gleam to it, you know? A smoothness that inks and pens cannot match. It wasn’t until I discovered the art and books of William Low that I began to rethink my perceptions about the form. And these days? These days it can sometimes be difficult to find a picture book that hasn’t been manipulated on a screen in some way. And, in the case of books like Sweet Dreamers by Isabelle Simler, you could be forgiven for not realizing that it’s art constructed on a computer at all. Simler has previously wowed American audience with such books as Plume and the magnificent The Blue Hour. Now, thanks in part to the elegant translation by Sarah Ardizzone, she has crafted a new kind of bedtime book. One rooted in poetry, dreams, seasons, fuzzy noses, lilting words, and a type of scratch art never before made possible.“Slung like a hammock, / the sloth dreams / of spring-loaded sprinters, / of rockets blasting off, / of pump-action spinning tops.” Twenty-seven animals all sleep, in different positions, times of day, and seasons. Some dream upside down and others standing up. Opposite each short poem, describing the dreamer, is a very close look at its face as it sleeps. Some have furry cheeks and adorable whiskers. Others are slimy, nasty, or just downright poisonous. Rendered unconscious, the child reader can press up close to them without fear of reprisal until, at last, we reach the very last creature asleep. It’s a child, just like the one reading this book, and soon enough you can bet that young readers will join that person in slumberland.Before I say anything at all about the art, I want to give a little credit where credit is due to the poems themselves. I see a fair number of poetry books for kids in a given year, and when those books are translations I set the bar fairly low. As such, I found myself just delighted by Simler’s wordplay. Or should I say Ardizzone’s? Remember that Simler has been translated from the original French, and a good translator can be worth their weight in gold if they know what they’re doing. Each little poem feels as succinct and brief as a haiku, but without the limitations of the form. The descriptions are affecting. Bats surround themselves with “kite-fingers folded like a blanket”. “The elephant dreams in granite” so large that she feels “Planted by a heavy drowsiness.” And then there is the giraffe. “This elastic giant / leaves the acacia trees / to fold herself / into a slender snooze.” There’s no fat to these poems. In brevity they remain evocative. They even manage to work in factual information on the sly. The ant “gathers and collects hundreds of quick naps” while with “One eye open, the other shut, / the dolphin only half-dreams.” After reading through these I went back to the publication page of this book and found a credit there to the French National Museum of Natural History, “for their friendly fact-checking”. But since you’ll find no Bibliography or list of sources in the back, so I’d say this is better slated for your poetry section than your sleep-habits-of-animals section. Nothing wrong with that.That same publication page that told me about the French National Museum of Natural History was where I learned that “the illustrations were created digitally”. Not much more is said beyond that. Not that I caught on right away. On a first read of the book I just assumed that I was looking at standard scratch art. The kind where some kind of black coating has been placed on top of a colorful undercoating, and you scratch away the black to get at the colors underneath. Only, upon closer inspection I was baffled. How was Simler getting so many layers on top of one another? Look at that first close-up image of the upside-down sloth. Notice that the little hairs on the sloth’s face aren’t all the same color. In fact, they overlap one another. I tried in vain to figure out how you could layer colors like that (multiple layers of colors, and you just dig in deeper to get different colors?). But learning that the art is from a computer doesn’t diminish the power and impact of these pages. If anything, it deepens my appreciation of them (no pun intended).Simler strategically splits her book into different sections. After the title page the first thing you see is a wordless two-page spread of a large moon peeking out between the branches of a tree. These silent spreads appear nine times, each one featuring the moon and a new environment. If the moon appears above the ocean then we’ll see how the ocean denizens doze. If the moon is over a forest, woodland creatures sleep. It’s so gratifying to witness an artist unafraid to keep her book long, in order to put in each and every last beautiful spread. As for the poems themselves, I love pairing a distant full-body shot of the mammal, fish, bird, reptile, or insect on the left-hand page, coupling it with an up-close-and-personal view of the animal’s face on the opposite side. Sometimes Simler will switch up the game, putting the face on the left-hand side and the poem on the right, but whatever her choice, it always feels just right. The zoomed in angles of the featured critters are sometimes difficult to distinguish unless you back up a little. So while this may be a bedtime book at its core, it’s actually a darn good nature-based poetry book as well. Just perfect for reading aloud to groups who would like to see it across a crowded room.Every country that produces picture books for children will, at some point, rely on local animals for their stories. And when those books are imported into the United States you can usually identify the book's point of origin by the kinds of animals included. In the case of Sweet Dreamers it is not immediately apparent that this is European (specifically French) fare. After all, the first two animals included are the sloth and the humpback whale. I found it interesting that Simler chose two animals that sleep upside down, though in entirely different situations. That said, the next animal is a “red-breasted robin”. Now the robins of Europe (I’m thinking specifically of England in this case) are different from the robins of the United States but they do both carry one specific similarity: red breasts. This particular robin has tucked its head under its wing, thereby cleverly avoiding identification. Even so, not many pages later you run across a hedgehog. Hedgehogs pepper the picture book landscape overseas. Here, they’re a rare breed. Even so, there are so many animals from so many places in the world, kids are bound to recognize quite a few of them, even if they don’t live in their own backyards.A much quoted line from Walter de la Mare states that, “Only the rarest kind of best is good enough for our young” (I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the gist of it). Digital art is by no means uncommon, but rare is the book for kids using it to such a fine degree as you’ll find in Sweet Dreamers. By all rights it should just be another one of those rote poetry animal books, just with a sleepytime twist. Instead, it’s a deeply engaging, majestic, lush affair (if “lush” is the right word for all these tiny scratched lines). Luminous in its linework, this is a book begging to be shared and read over and over again. A little something for everyone, and a whole lot of something you’ve never seen before.For ages 6-10.

Enter the dreams of creatures around the world in this picture book. The dreams of the animals can be surprising like the sloth dreaming of racing and moving fast without moving at all. They can also be more logical, like the ant who dreams of dots marching in single file. Other animals are shown in their habitat and their unique way of sleeping like the swallow who sleeps while flying, the flamingo who has pink dreams, or the frog who sleeps in the mud. Each animal is given a short poem about their slumber, creating a book that is ideal for bedtime but fascinating enough to return to again and again.Simler’s writing is exquisite. By using different approaches to the various animals, she creates a book that explores the wide variety of creatures in our world while focusing specifically on how they sleep. There are the animals who are prey that sleep looking for security and safety while the predators like the lion with a full belly don’t need to worry about that. The illustrations in the picture book are equally successful with their touches of neon orange illuminating the night. Done in fine lines, the pages use their mostly black backgrounds very successfully as the creatures shine against it.A delightful mix bedtime and beasts. Appropriate for ages 5-8.

Sweet Dreamers by Isabelle Simler is filled with unique art of lovely landscapes and the animals that live in them from a sloth to a firefly, each dreaming a dream. The poem-like descriptions that partner with each drawing capture the dreamlike illustrations. The one tiny clarification the adult reading the story would want to make is with the spider illustration and description. More likely, that would be a female spider with eight moons mirrored in her eyes, rather than his. This is a small clarification as it is the female that builds the web! As a zoologist, I did not notice any other needed clarifications. I would recommend this book as an addition to bedtime and naptime reading.

I may have just read the best children's nonfiction book of the year.Sweet Dreamers is a dream-of-a-book, the intertwined poems about the beautiful and unique dreaming habits of koalas and dolphins, ants and spiders, whales and squirrels, wolves and octopuses, cats and seahorses. Who knew animals have so many different ways to sleep? All illustrated with magnificent closeups of drowsing animals, each etched and highlighted with shimmering sparkles.I love this book.