Sleeping Boy - Hardcover

Craddock, Sonia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689817630 ISBN 13: 9780689817632

Publisher: Atheneum, 1999

Synopsis

Laugh and smile. Smile and laugh. That's Herr and Frau Rosen -- so happy to have a new baby boy! But when they invite all their friends in Berlin to celebrate the birth of little Knabe Rosen, they leave out one person -- the dreaded Major Krieg. When he comes anyway, he snatches the sleeping boy from the nurse's arms and predicts: "On your sixteenth birthday you will hear the drums drumming as the army marches by. Off to war you'll go -- and you will not come home." However, Tante Taube, the sleeping boy's aunt, hasn't given her blessing yet. "Instead of going off to war," she says, "Knabe Rosen will only sleep...sleep through poverty and war, bad times and sadness, until PEACE comes to Berlin." In this remarkable modern allegory, Sonia Craddock weaves a story of the twentieth century into the familiar framework of the Sleeping Beauty tale. Leonid Gore's resplendent illustrations delicately capture the ethereal, timeless quality of the story while firmly placing it against the backdrop of

About this title

About the Author

Sonia Craddock (1941-1997) was born in England and later emigrated to Canada, where she and her husband raised three children and where she studied for her doctorate in education. Of Sleeping Boy, Dr. Craddock wrote that it is "...a picture book for the millennium. It is set in the beginning of the twentieth century, in Berlin, where all is a whirl of gaiety and prosperity, and finishes in the hopeful spirit of the present -- embracing the Depression, two world wars, and the Cold War. It's a retelling that has different levels of understanding for different ages...Young children will hear and see the surface level of the story, while older children will also see the story of the twentieth century -- and the 'sleeping' of peace."

From Publishers Weekly

The late Craddock's sophisticated reworking of the Sleeping Beauty story is nothing short of astonishing, both in the vitality of its prose and its haunting imagery. The story begins in turn-of-the-century Berlin, where Knabe Rosen's birth is being celebrated. Gore's (Lucy Dove) ethereal artwork shows two rose-hued insets of the joyous parents and newborn; peeking through at the outer edges, however, are darkened street scenes seemingly spun from spiderwebs. Prose and pictures in tandem convey the tension between life within the home and life without. Major Krieg (the German word for war), who is left out of the party, nonetheless turns up to play the part of the malevolent fairy and bestow a curse on the child: on his 16th birthday the sound of drums will entice Knabe into the army, never to return. In the only pair of full-bleed paintings, Gore brilliantly contrasts first the loving father and mother gently cradling the baby, all of his relatives encircling him like a band of angels; then just a few pages later Major Krieg's black gloved fingers hold the baby aloft, the baby's head cropped at the top of the page and the background a deep blood red. Fortunately, Tante Taube (the German word for dove) mitigates this dire prediction with her blessing: instead of marching off to war, when Knabe hears the drums he will fall asleep "until PEACE comes to Berlin." As the household slumbers, swept up in the spell, Gore's moody, ethereal acrylics are scattered across the pages like a series of half-remembered snapshots, their surfaces hazy, their images indistinct. He conjures the darkly ominous talismans of war: barbed wire and guard dogs; the steel-spiked helmets of Kaiser Wilhelm's troops; the swastika and jackboots of Hitler's army. The house itself becomes entombed in the Berlin Wall. Finally, when peace comes, the wall comes down and the family awakens to celebrate their son's 16th birthday. Part modern-day fairy tale, part Brothers Grimm, part allegory, this is an ambitious, eerie and visually stunning work for all ages. Ages 6-9.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0689817630
• ISBN 13: 9780689817632
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 40
• Illustrator: Gore Leonid