This was such a sweet book and my grandson loved it. Many thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

The illustrations in The Little Moose Who Couldn't Go to Sleep are cute, and this could have been a good book. However, between ablest terms and the writing, it fails to be that. The entire book is written in what it calls moose-speak but is just baby talk or making fun of non-native English speakers. That is a hard fail for me, as a mother, educator, and person.

I am so confused about why this author chose to write an entire children's story with purposefully awful grammar. This is a cute story about a little moose who can't sleep and the forest animals she lives with. I like the idea that there's a Mother Moose (like Mother Goose, get it?) who is sort of a god who plants the stars and runs the world. There are really cute elements to this book, but why on earth do they talk this way???? It's almost like making fun of the beliefs and dialect of cultures that people deem uneducated. Not really funny, not really cute. Other reviewers call it baby talk, but the grown ups in this story and the narrator use it too, so I don't think it's attempting to be baby talk. Example: "Well, Little Moose, she would always drag along behind. She feel like her got a pillow stuffed between the ears. And the teachers shake their heads. “Little Moose does not pay detention. She does not learn good, like the brothers and sisters! And Little Moose, she feel bad."

Parts of this book are cute and sweet and creative. The glossary of the made up words at the start is cute and it's certainly a creative world, but I don't know about the choice of dialect.

I read a digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

I read this to the kids I nanny and they loved the story so much. They gave it their thumbs up approval of "silly"!

I did not get a chance to read this, it would not let me download it to read it. I am sorry.