Silli’s Sheep

Silli, a small gray-haired gentleman with a bright red nose, eager eyes, and a can-do attitude, lives a solitary but happy life in a mountain meadow: “All day he frolicked in the sunshine, while at night he needed nothing but moonbeams for a bed,” writes Stone (Knot Cannot). But a chilly wind foretells colder days ahead, and Silli’s convinced he needs a woolly warm sweater; in one of Thomas’s (Hug It Out!) consistently effervescent ink, gouache, and colored pencil vignettes, Silli imagines himself covered in soft, fluffy wool. True to his name, however, Silli goes looking for wool in all the wrong places, pinning his hopes on five huge sheep-shaped rocks to be his yarn source. Silli’s efforts can be amusing (“Follow me, sheep!” he says to a rock, holding out “handfuls of hay”), but his confusion about sheep’s attributes may baffle readers, since he clearly knows what the mammal looks and feels like (his inspiration comes from realistically sheep-shaped clouds). And though the ending finds him cozy and warm in a windbreak created from the rocks, skewing toward a gentle, absurd tickle, readers may find the inadvertency of the solution more exasperating than amusing. Ages 3–7. Author’s agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Agency. Illustrator’s agent: Kirsten Hall, Catbird Productions. (Aug.)