Once Upon a Time, the End (Asleep in 60 Seconds) [Hardcover]

Kindergarten-Grade 2–Here's a fresh approach to fractured fairy tales: take one small child's insatiable demand for Just one more story and add a sleepy parent's wish to get the bedtime ritual over with as quickly as possible. The result is this collection of eight condensed folktales. For example, Goldilocks and the Bears begins, There were some bears;/It doesn't really matter how many./There was a bunch./Let's get to the point: and ends, When the bears came back,/They found her asleep./She woke up, screamed, and ran home/So she could sleep in her own bed./Just like you. A few nursery rhymes (Hickory, dickory, dock,/A mouse ran up the clock./The clock struck eight./Oh, my, it's late!/So the mouse went straight to bed) and jokes round out the book. Blitt's ink-and-watercolor illustrations are amusing, with fine lines and soothing colors underscoring the comedy in the characters and situations. The cover shows an intensely alert toddler on the lap of a sleeping father, surrounded by several dozing characters (Goliath sucking his thumb, for example, and Red Riding Hood conked out next to the wolf dressed as Grandma). The sometimes sly, sometimes outrageous, sometimes simply silly humor will go over the heads of most preschoolers, but it's right on target for their older siblings (and tired parents, of course).–Lauralyn Persson, Wilmette Public Library, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* K-Gr. 3. "Is there a pea under your bed? / Then what's your excuse? / Go to bed." Reading at bedtime to his kid, who refuses to fall asleep, a desperate dad shortens the old stories, twists the nursery rhymes, and adds his own messages (" Why are you still awake?") in hilarious, short, fractured fairy tales and verse. On each spacious double-page spread, Blitt's cartoon-style, line-and-watercolor pictures are both beautiful and funny, whether depicting the mayhem of the "Two Little Pigs" or the cozy view of Dad surrounded by books, desperate to get his sweet kid to sleep so that "everyone could live happily ever after." As the parent gets more exhausted, the stories get shorter, angrier, and wilder (when all those kids in the shoe won't go to bed, the old lady sells them to the zoo). The triumph of the child who refuses to bow to authority will appeal to preschoolers, and so will the loving bedtime scenes. Older elementary-school children who know the stories and can appreciate the parody will probably like this, too. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"Smart and funny and beautiful and pithy. I really love it and I'm very jealous."

-- Maira Kalman

"Better than Children's Benadryl when it's cocktail hour and the kid won't go to sleep."

-- Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket)

Once upon a time

there was a grown-up

looking for a book

with very short bedtime stories

for a kid who wouldn't go to sleep.

So the grown-up picked up this book

and read this flap

and took the book home

and read it out loud

and they both laughed

and fell fast asleep

fast.

Just like you.

The end.

Geoffrey Kloske is a book editor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Barry Blitt's illustrations have appeared on the cover of the New Yorker and have also graced the pages of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly. He is the illustrator of Once Upon a Time, the End (Asleep in 60 Seconds) by Geoffrey Kloske and The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn by Robert Burleigh, as well as other picture books.  He lives in Riverside, Connecticut.