Sleep Little Centipede Sleep

Elizabeth Levin is a professor of psychology at Laurentian University.

Bugs have taken over George’s life. They are centre stage in the two
parallel stories intertwined in this short story for young readers. At
home, the new motion detector keeps going off in the family’s hardware
store situated just under their apartment. George keeps losing sleep as
the alarm goes off nightly, but there is never an intruder in sight. At
school, George is so tired that he dozes off, only to be bitten by a
centipede who is then crushed by one of George’s friends. A centipede
also happens to be the pet of a four-year-old assigned to George as a
reading buddy. Too bad George crushes the pet—or does he? What George
learns about spiders helps him solve the mystery at home and discover
the identity of the intruder.

The text is accompanied by several black-and-white line drawings that
help break up the text but do not add to the story. Each individual
story theme is incomplete, and it is not likely that young readers will
be drawn into the mystery of why the burglar alarm goes off. Not a
first-choice purchase.