Café Corner Bookshelf

Welcome to the Developmental Studies Café Corner Bookshelf where you will find all the picture books featured in our monthly Dev Studies Café. 

June 2025

Book: A Sleepless Night
Author: Micaela Chirif
Illustrator: Joaquín Camp
Year: 2024
Publisher: Transit Books
Originally published in: Spanish, translated by Jordan Landsman

In centers all over the city, I have been hearing the phrase “no bathroom words, please”. Sure, I can understand that a detailed discussion about bowels while trying to eat snack poses some appetite challenges. But still, I keep wondering about this phrase. Every human I have ever met - young, old, or something in between - uses the bathroom multiple times a day. On top of that, children, from infancy to preschool, have a particularly bathroom-forward relationship with the world. Through the diapers and potty learning alone, it makes so much sense to me that bathroom words would be, well, interesting.

In A Sleepless Night we have an immediately-relatable tale of a baby who cannot be consoled. When little Elisa starts crying one night, she can’t stop. In fact, “she cried so hard you could hear it on the other side of the planet. Fortunately, it was daytime there and everyone was awake” (p. 10-11). Her wall-shaking cries wake the neighbors, who come one by one, bearing outlandish solution after outlandish solution; treasures, sweets, walking, telling secrets, even dressing up like fruit. Nothing works. Just what is the matter with little Elisa anyway?!

Have you guessed it? Poor baby Elisa feels immediately better- and goes right to sleep- when she finally lets out “a colossal fart”. The illustrations (Camp) in this book are rendered in inky marker and reminiscent of saturated notebook paper. It is hard to imagine children will not delight in this tale of insomnia, chaos, family and flatulence. In Chirif’s A Sleepless Night, I have found a book I hope educators will use to consider a different way to live with bathroom words in their classrooms. After all, the bathroom words can be silenced, but colossal farts cannot.
 
Until next month,

Catherine