Tell Me Your Dreams

PreS-Gr 1–Based on Kloots’s own nighttime routine with her son, a blonde, jean-clad mother snuggles her small blond child at bedtime, getting him excited for falling asleep by relating enticing dream scenarios. “In your dreams, anything is possible. In your dreams you can go anywhere. Do everything. See anyone.” “Trash truck!” exclaims the boy. Subsequently, the bedroom is replaced with a dreamscape where the boy’s dad (apparently not present in real life) appears as the truck driver and takes him for a ride. The truck becomes an airplane flying through ice cream clouds and crashing through a rainbow, then a boxcar train “gliding over the ocean” next to high-fiving dolphins, then returning to the boy’s room where he lovingly hugs his father in the dream. Back in the real bedroom, the mom gives her son a final injunction to tell her what he did and who he saw. Willmore’s digital, mixed-media illustrations dazzle with colors, their spreads full of energy depicted with many swirls and bursts of confetti. Unfortunately, the unchanging grins of the characters, frozen in some rictus of happiness, undercut the positive tone of the story instead of adding to it.