A girl lies in bed with a head full of thoughts. It’s impossible to sleep. She tries every trick in the book from making up rhymes to counting sheep but sleep doesn’t come. So she counts again. Slower.
The sheep she imagines are brought to life through the illustrations while the reader counts with her. The first sheep grazes on the rug, the second falls down the chimney. On the counting goes, every sheep a surprise and a delight, until we reach 10. And the girl is asleep.
Sometimes sleep defies us. The harder we try, the more awake we feel, until even resting on the pillow feels like an effort. This imaginative bedtime story offers readers a new game to play as they lie awake. Don’t let those sheep run past. Picture them instead. What makes one different from another? The examples shown encourage gentle and funny ideas that turn sleepless nights into restful joy.
The retro illustration style, mixing block colours with simple patterns, is highly effective. The sheep are given the spotlight. Their actions and expressions give them character and the blue backgrounds hint at dreams and imagination.
This is also fantastic as a counting book. Many books show numbers with the number represented in pictures on the opposite page (eg two sheep for the number 2, eight sheep for the number 8) but this is, strictly speaking, about number recognition and not counting to 10. Certainly the reader can count those pictures but the book as a whole would count to 55. It is important to also have books that count up one integer at a time to reach 10.
It is impossible not to love these sheep. Not to love the creative twist put on an old game for sleepless nights. A fantastic bedtime book, a great counting aid and an all-round smile raiser.
- I Can’t Sleep by Gracia Iglesias and Ximo Abadía is available now, priced £6.99, from Templar Books. (Provided for review)
