While You Are Sleeping
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
While you are sleeping, does the rest of the world sleep, too?
Not everyone.
In this dreamy book, which won the 2015 Silent Book Contest at the prestigious Bologna Children's Book Fair, Mariana Ruiz Johnson conjures up the ordinary yet extraordinary world outside the window of a sleeping child. Some people are working. Some people are eating. Some are walking their dogs, others are watching the stars. And some are setting off on an adventure that might inspire an artist to create a book. As magical as the night sky, readers will return to Mariana Ruiz Johnson's illustrations again and again, finding new stories each time they visit. Plus, this is the fixed format version, which looks almost identical to the print edition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Painted in brilliant folk-art hues, Argentinian illustrator Johnson's wordless story starts with a view through a window. Inside, a mother reads to her golden-haired son, then tiptoes away after he falls asleep. Now the view pulls back: the boy's parents share wine downstairs, a girl cycles by, and a jaguar and a deer play music together on a nearby rooftop. The view again widens to reveal more buildings the city night is alive with activity, and the two brightly colored animals are joined by four more. (Observant readers may have spotted them earlier in the story.) They strike out across a placid sea in a red dugout and head for a primeval wilderness, where they light torches and make a bonfire in the dark. At last their dancing makes the bonfire rise up into the sky: it's the morning sun. Back in the city, the boy awakens. The story's easy slide from reality to myth and back again recalls the magical realism of authors like Garc a M rquez and more stories are hinted at in the windows that fill the boy's neighborhood. Ages 3 5.
