Silli's Sheep
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Sophie's Squash and other super-silly picture books, here is the endearing story of a man named Silli who tries to tame the wind in ridiculous ways.
Silli lives in the middle of a meadow, in the open air. One morning, a gust of wind pays a visit--brrrr! What if the wind comes to stay? If only Silli could find some sheep, he'd have wool to knit a sweater to keep him warm. Luckily, he spots five large "sheep" up on a hill--perfect! It's just too bad they're resistant to herding and their wool is incredibly hard. But when Silli leans against them, they block the wind and keep him warm. . . . Perhaps he can build a shelter made of sheep? And so he resourcefully arranges his sturdy sheep (which are actually sheep-shaped rocks) into a little hut, and is finally warm and dry. This charming story--crafted in the tradition of folkloric characters who are well-meaning, likeable, and also a bit ridiculous--is sure to have a ton of kid appeal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
