500 DREAMS

Which dream will you choose?

Seek and ye shall find! That’s the imaginative premise of this engaging guide to helping kids select dreams—500 in all!—to carry them off to a peaceful slumber. On each spread, readers are invited to locate items and characters involved in various activities—all of them opportunities for pleasant dreams. In Candyland, readers can “meet sugarplum fairies, their wings all aquiver,” “tunnel inside the deep Ice Crystal Cave,” and “dive in a puddle of pink bubble tea.” In outer space, they can “chat with a Martian,” “race UFOs,” and “whoosh on a comet.” This rollicking U.K. import features 23 other amazing dreamlands. Eckford’s bouncy, well-crafted rhymes appear beneath Castro’s busy, vividly colored digital illustrations, populated by a bevy of energetic, racially diverse young kids. An answer key proves a welcome tool, as some details may be challenging to discern; several topics may be out of many children’s realm of experience—mythological characters, for instance. Happily, the work offers great opportunities for learning and vocabulary development. Children will get the most out of the book if they browse through it first, choose a few favorite dreamlands, and then pick several dreams within those realms. Indeed, it would take more than a year to experience all 500 suggestions if they were each to be “dreamed” consecutively night after night!

A dream of a bedtime romp. But who’ll want to sleep when they’re having this much fun?