Dream Animals: A Bedtime Journey

Visually elegant and textually cadenced.

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. (Oct.)

Silver Winner from NAPPA (National Parenting Publication Awards)