Bound To Stay Bound

School Library Journal - 11/01/2014 PreS-Gr 1—In this familiar-sounding story, an exhausted animal tries to sleep as his overly friendly neighbor pays him repeated visits. Late one night, Duck is bored and decides Bear will entertain him, but grumpy Bear rejects his suggestions to watch movies and make smoothies, sending the bird home with a "Goodnight already." Duck turns up twice more to interrupt his neighbor's sleep and is dismissed by an increasingly irate Bear, who, in the end, is left wide awake, while Duck falls fast asleep next door. The premise of this story is not very original, and even the ending won't be a surprise. Bear comes across as a grouchy curmudgeon, while Duck is oblivious and annoying, and their dialogue is stilted. The illustrations, however, are charming, with solid color backgrounds highlighting moods, yellow for Duck and blue-gray for Bear, as well as the characters themselves, who stand out against the saturated backdrops. Little details add color to each page, from Bear's pink stuffed animal to Duck's red electric guitar. For libraries that have Bonny Becker's A Visitor for Bear (2012) and A Bedtime for Bear (2010, both Candlewick), this may not be a first purchase, but the fresh, funny art makes it a worthy consideration.—Marian McLeod, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Greenwich, CT - Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Booklist - 11/15/2014 Poor Bear. All he wants to do is go to sleep. But his neighbor Duck is wide awake and wants company. Will Bear play cards? Read stories? Make smoothies? Be sympathetic to a stubbed beak? Bear and Duck play out a back-and-forth scenario of approach and rebuff, until the tables are turned: Duck falls asleep but Bear is now wide awake. The story is reliant on the visual cues of Davies’ comic illustrations, so that the exchange between the characters is funny rather than intolerable. Duck is so small compared to Bear, yet his larger-than-life (and possibly caffeine-induced?) energy overwhelms his much larger neighbor. Bear becomes more and more irritable with each interruption from Duck, yet maintains a strained cuddliness—he is always holding his teensy bedtime bunny in his massive paw. (Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the bunny is a silent participant in the action, often reflecting Bear’s feelings.) While not a typical bedtime battle of wills, parents and kids will recognize the power struggle between Duck and Bear and pick sides accordingly. - Copyright 2014 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 01/01/2015 Sleepy Bear takes his cuddly bunny and heads to bed (“I could sleep for weeks. Months, even!”), but his sleep is disrupted by his bouncy neighbor duck, who’s ready for entertainment (“Hey! I’m bored! Want to hang out?”). Every time Bear manages to chuck Duck out of the house and doze off again, the wily waterfowl finds a way back in and clamors for company and attention. Finally a fed-up bear manages to eject Duck, who goes home and nods off-while poor Bear is now roused and wide awake. There’s definitely a toddler/parent vibe in the relationship between dynamo Duck and weary Bear (particularly Duck’s insistence that his stubbing his beak was an emergency that required Bear’s immediate attention); their dialogue, especially when Duck pelts Bear with eager questions (to which the answer is always “No”), is scripted perfectly for reading aloud with maximum comic élan. The digital art draws on a retro-tinged palette of teal blues (especially in Bear’s nocturnal scenes) emphasized with the occasional contrasting goldenrod in full-bleed backgrounds. Bear and Duck evince a lively individuality that contrasts with the smooth evenness of the backgrounds and the touches of orderly pattern; Bear is a wonderfully lugubrious foil for Duck, a softly rumpled blend of brown and black strokes that suggests a whiskery dad awakened in the night. An anarchic mix of bedtime and anti-bedtime book, this could provide a great transition point to more soporific texts-or a heavy-handed hint from parents just trying to get some sleep. DS - Copyright 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.