The Waiting Place

Sutherland owes a debt to Van Allsburg in his first book, a fanciful dream sequence in black-and-white charcoal pictures. The artist's perspective places readers in the middle of the tale's initially stark setting: the room of a child who cannot sleep. The unchanging vantage point, from the youngster's bed, keeps the footboard in view at the bottom edge of each illustration. Also unchanging is the singsong rhythm of the verse (""Sometimes I just can't sleep./ Maybe it's because my toes itch,/ And the rickety floorboards creak,/ While along in the bath the faucet drips,/ And the rusty old bedsprings squeak""). What varies from spread to spread are the visitors to the chamber, who appear as the child muses on all that he or she will do ""tomorrow."" Among the visitors summoned are the jungle animals who will ""sing me lazy lullabies,"" a chess-playing Gryphon, Vikings in a longboat and marching beefeaters. While Sutherland demonstrates his abilities as a skilled draftsman, the perspective makes the characters seem all the more imposing and may even frighten younger children. The imagined settings, from an underwater seascape filled with fish and classical art treasures to a star-filled vista with a diminutive astronaut and a crescent moon with human facial features, will hold interest for some adults, but the illustrations more often evoke claustrophobia than the playfulness of a child's imagination. All ages. (Nov.)