School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2--When the wind blows, Silli searches his overstuffed sack for a solution, attempting to use an umbrella, tennis racket, and book to hold off the chilly breeze. When fluffy and distinctly sheep-shaped clouds float by, he is inspired to search out a sheep to make himself a wool sweater. His confidence pays off when he spots five unusual sheep on a hill, and persistently and hilariously rounds them up to shear their shockingly "hard as stone" wool. All's well in the end when Silli figures out the best strategy for using his impossible sheep to protect himself from the wind. Thomas and Stone create many comedic beats, with the illustrations moving the story briskly forward while granting the text a carefully crafted terseness. The delightfully comic illustrations add the perfect amount of whimsy to this charming noodlehead story. Preschoolers will howl when Silli, unable to find a sheepdog, acts out the role himself. VERDICT All readers will be charmed by the earnest Silli's perseverance, in a tale that celebrates nonsense while skillfully keeping children in the know. Recommended for most collections.--Amanda Foulk, Sacramento P.L.
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Author's agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Agency. Illustrator's agent: Kirsten Hall, Catbird Productions. (Aug.)
