Goodnight, Butterfly (A Very Impatient Caterpillar Book)

PreS-Gr 2--Awakened in the middle of the night, a hyperactive butterfly, aided by an eternally patient porcupine, launches a series of increasingly silly attempts to get back to sleep. Burach's mannered humor, stuffed with postmodern gags, winking references, and slapstick action beats, seem to be aimed at adults. The stylized illustrations, made with pencil, crayon, acrylic paint, and digital coloring, recall a self-consciously zany comic strip--an effect magnified by the choice to eschew narration entirely in favor of snappy back-and-forth dialogue in colored speech bubbles. The brief allusions to the phenomenon of nocturnality shoehorned in along the way contribute little to the atmosphere, as they are too slight to be informative and too dry to be funny. Unlike the antic pacing found in a Mo Willems's book, which creates a narrative arc and leads to a conclusion, this is frenetic without focus. VERDICT The irreverent humor and wacky visual aesthetic, while amusing enough, may fly over the heads of children.--Jonah Dragan