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So Sleepy Story!

Page history last edited by Jaclyn O'Brien 14 years, 3 months ago

 

Plot Summary

     So Sleepy Story by Uri Shulevitz is a story of a house and everything in it and the world around it is sleepy.  Inside the house, the chairs, curtains, pictures, and a little boy are sound asleep until something happens that wakes them up.  Music floats through the little boys room waking up everything including the little boy.  The objects all dance and shake to the beat of the sound as the little boy calmly stays laying in his bed observing what is happening.  All of the sudden, the music gradually drifts away back into the night putting everything back into the "sleepy" state.  The little boy closes his eyes and drifts back into his slumber.  

     The genre of this book is fiction, because the things that come to life in the book are inanimate figures, and would never be able to dance and fall asleep the way they do in this story.  The characters portrayed in this story are all the figures with their outrageous facial expressions and the little boy.  The difference between the characture-like picture frames and other pieces of furniture and the boy is that the boy does not actively take part in the dancing.  He is awaken, but not jarred or shocked by the noise.  He lays calmly and observes the figures and the musical notes that were brought into his room.  This helps support the overall message and classic theme of bedtime.  It shows that even if children are awaken by nightmares or bad dreams, they can easily fall back asleep by relaxing and staying calm.  The disruption from the sleep can easily be fixed by falling right back into sleep no matter the chaos that was happening in their head.  The soothing tone, and feeling of gentleness makes it a great bedtime story. 

     

 

 

Artistic Elements 

     The illustrations in So Sleepy Story are clever, playful, soothing, and whimsical.  Uri Shulevitz captures a gentle feeling using hues of blues and dark colors to show the darkness of the night.  When the music comes floating through the window, hues of orange, red, and green are displayed to emphasize the feeling of a fun, alive atmosphere.  The pictures are done in watercolor, which adds to the feeling that the soft-sounding texts provides.   The style of art in this children's story is surrealistic art.  This style of art contains "startling images and incongrueties" that often suggest an "attitude or mockery about conventionalities" (Cullinen, 82).  For example, towards the end of the book, there's a huge picture of dishes on the shelves in the house.  That is completely normal and realistic in a real world situation, but then the dishes all have arms and legs with faces that are made to look like they are sleeping.  This specific image is incongruent with what dishes on shelves realistically look like. 

     The placement of the illustrations are always on top of the text.  The text is very simple and always written on white space on the bottom of the page.  The illustrations are big and take up the whole entire top three fourths of the page.  To seperate the picture and the white space, the illustration has a little black borderline.  However, on some pages there are two illustrations next to each other, with text on the white space still below it.  And around these pictures the borderline still exists.  As the music entered into the house and the colors started to shift from darker to brighter halfway through the story, the picture became a little bit smaller creating a white space around the border of the pictures.  Then when the shift was compeltely done, the pictures turned into a full bleed page to show the liveliness of the music playing and the characters dancing around to it.  For two pages of this, there was no text.  It simply showed the pattern of full bleed page on the left hand side, and then a big picture on the right side, but with a border of white around it.  Then the shift started back again going from bright colored drawings to darker hues with written texts underneath the illustrations. 

     The relationship between the words and pictures is an excellent correlation that truly integrates every element expressed in the story to give the reader a depiction of the mood.  For example, the words that the author choose are simple and soft-sounding.  She made them rhyme which almost makes the story more of a poem.  On every page, she only wrote very little and the lines themselves were very short.  By doing this, it leaves very little description to the reader.  However, the amazing illustrations depicted exactly what was going on in this story with help from the brief text.  The pictures may seem simple, but yet they are clever because you can see the stillness of the night, and the fun of the dance party.  You can see every inanimate object come to life expressed on their facial expressions.  For example, on the page where the words read "and sleepy boy opens his sleepy eyes" the text is simple and does not say a whole lot.  Then you look at the picture and you see a mixture of colorful and dark hues of him in his bed scratching his head looking confused as his eyes are drawn in a way to look slightly heavy.  The posts on his bed look have faces that look like they are startiing to wake up and look confused as well.  This is an excellent page of the words correlating directly with the text, even when the text does not have much description.  The relationship between the two elements is impecable!

 

 

Analysis and Critique

     Uri Shulevitz created a fantastic story that would be effective to young children.  The literary features in this story are simple and easy to understand.  Children will grasp the concept of what is going on in the story just through the ease of the text.  Then the illustrations show the story in a whole other light with the playful pictures that are yet gentle and soothing to a young child.  Together, the effectiveness is rich and displayed in interesting ways.  Shulevitz established a mood and setting of the story with her appropriate use between the voice of the text and the style of the pictures.  The pictures expand on what the story is saying and doesn't just show a duplicate of what was described in the text.  For example, on the pages with no text, a child would still be able to see that everyone is awake and having fun and that the night was disrupted with some loud music that made them want to dance.  This also is relevent in the messages the book is sending out.  For children who may have nightmares or have their sleep disrupted can cause a lot of confusion and feelings of nervousness, and this story shows that a little boy is awaken and confused, but stay calms until he realizes that the music is gone, and he can go back to being sound asleep in peace.  It also emphasizes imagination in children, because everyone knows that inanimate objects do not have human like qualities, but in dreams, nightmares, and in our imagination, sometimes they can.  The established mood of gentlessness and soothing also directly correlates with the theme of bedtime, making it a good, calming story to read to a child right before they are about to go to sleep. 

     Overall, I highly recommend this book to every parent to read to their child.  It's a good story and believe children would enjoy it simply because the pictures are fun and detailed capturing their imagination and making them really think.   It's an innocent book that I feel children will fall in love with and will make their parents read over and over again. 

 

 

Citation

 

Shulevitz, Uri. So Sleepy Story. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006.

 

 

References

 

 

 

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