The perfect bedtime story for stubborn children who just want "one more story". I can imagine reading this to your child who is too sleepy to go to bed. If the first few yawning stories don't get them, I have no doubt that they'll be passed right out by the end. This book is an excellent idea and well-written.

I personally did not gel with this book and just found it hard to engage or get a benefit from it but the illustrations were just the opposite - loved them.

Personal taste here I think and not a criticism as what works for one does not always work for the other !

Thank you NetGalley for a copy of this book!
While this is certainly very very pretty and the illustrations are truly out of this world, I realized I wasn't the right age to request this! However, as a child I would have adored it!

Sleepy Stories is an award-winning collection of dream-inducing tales that Mario Levrero told his son while he dropped off to sleep almost every night. The day is ending, the first stars appear. It is time to start reading these wonderful yarns, but the protagonists of these stories are so, so tired, that you may never know if you are reading a book or dreaming. Levrero's brilliant prose, in which it is perhaps his most carefree and brilliant text, takes us to the encounter that occurs every day between the narrator (Levrero himself) and his son Nicolás, who, paying little attention to his father's fatigue, demands of him a story and then another. Thus, between yawning and snoring, six stories emerge from the dream, full of images that Bianki takes and reinterprets to create a fantastic book.

In these stories, Mario Levrero once again surprises the reader with fresh, deliberately amusing prose. Yawns, silences, snores and long sighs turn exhaustion and sloth into an expressive tension woven beyond the limits of reality, logic and the expected resolution. One man sleeps in his umbrella, another falls asleep on a skate and ends up on the ocean floor and yet another sleeps on an endless series of buses on his way to the home he never reaches. Each story is an exercise in boundless creativity in which weariness and fatigue are the protagonists and delirium is the key that lets us into a universe populated by absurd, deeply poetic situations. In Sleepy Stories we encounter Levrero at his most genuine, most uninhibited, most fantastic.

This was a cute book geared towards younger children at bedtime. The artwork was beautiful and even as a twenty three year old, I enjoyed reading it. I could definitely see where this would put a child to sleep at night if it was read to them at bedtime or naptime because it nearly put me to sleep as well. I feel like Sleepy Stories were all a story inside of a story. I definitely could see where kids would want more though at the end because There weren't really enough steps until the end of the book to put a five year old who is wide awake asleep. Coming from a former daycare teacher I definitely would have to read multiple books to a child of that age. Otherwise it was well thought out.

This is a collection of stories reluctantly told by a sleepy father night after night at the request of his insistent son. They are extremely short and don’t have much plot, but they are full of delicious nonsense that I found quite entertaining. The constant verbal tug of war between father and son is adorable, and the sleepy noises in bright, colourful letters also give the text a strong visual impact.

I actually enjoyed the illustrations more than the stories and I went back to them a couple of times after I had finished reading the text. I love the colour and contrast of the figures and animals, and just how whimsical these drawing are in general, almost like a visual representation of rambling dreams.

I would recommend this imaginative book to children and adults alike. Given the visuals, it would be a treat both to the person reading it and the one being read to.

A creative bedtime story told by a parent more tired than the child! Unique, absurd stories with cute illustrations.

I'd give this 5/5 for the artwork, but only 2/5 for the text. It's a shame, because the concept of a collection of bedtime collections about sleep was compelling, but the execution of this didn't work for me. The stories were brief but dull, and I don't see how they would interest a child. Additionally, I don't see how you could even read this book aloud to a child, due to the format. It's a shame as the artwork really is lovely.

Well, okay. This was... weird. This was certainly a book with a lot of yawning and deep sighing, I can tell you that. I really disliked the character of Nicolas, the son. I would probably spank the whining out of him if he was my child. The surreal art (that doesn't always have a lot to do with the stories) makes this NOT a children's book, I would say. But I don't think that it is an adult book either. To be honest, I'm a bit confused by this book, and I found it a little pretentious.

Hmmm - yes, well. The text of this is quite good in conveying and offering stories of sleepy characters, allegedly for sleepy adults to read to sleepy children in the hopes all the talk of sleep, yawning sound effects and so on will put them under. But at the same it was peppered with unattractive, semi-relevant at best artworks, and was just a little too pretentious for a book destined to be co-used by such a young audience. Treat this as a throw-away bit of Calvino-esque, Oulipo-esque whimsy, for which it comes recommended, but don't treat this surreal oddity as a book for the young – the RRP alone means it's not for the nursery.

Sleepy Stories is a collection of bedtime stories quite unlike the typical style. You have this dad who pleads sleepiness but his son refuses to listen to him and wants one more story. All the stories that the father narrates are related to characters falling into a deep sleep. What makes the stories funnier are the yawns that are interspersed in the narrative. But I expected far more from the book. There are barely 6 stories in the book. In fact, there are more pages of illustrations than stories. (The illustrations are ok though; they reminded me of old Russian storybooks I read in my childhood.) The font size is extremely small (at least in the ARC copy I received). It didn’t make for a comfortable digital read.
The idea is definitely good and might work well as a read-aloud at bedtime. But this entirely depends on the narrative capabilities of the parent.
Thank you, NetGalley and Elsewhere Editions, for the Advanced Review Copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

A very interesting point of view. I was not that found of the graphic and art found within the book.
What I liked was the fact that the situation encountered here reminds me of those books dedicated for parents to read to small children in order to induce sleep and a certain hypnotic trance. It is known that Mario Levrero was interested in self-hypnosis and in psychology therefore I am not surprised on the resemblance of these stories with the ones used for convincing the bundles of energy to sleep.
I think that each short story can be experienced differently and if read in the adequate tone it might induce the necessary sleep to the little kid listening to it.

I did not enjoy this book. I didn’t like the illustrations or the stories that were told. They just felt too dark to be for children.