Who Needs to Sleep Anyway?: How Animals Sleep

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Young Mahla is resisting her father’s efforts to put her to bed.
“Why do I need to go to sleep anyway?” she asks. A typical parent
might have answered, “Because I said so.” But Mahla’s father is a
Ph.D. who specializes in sleep disorders. Mahla and her father cut a
deal. If she gets into bed, her father will tell her everything she
wants to know about who needs to sleep and why. Mahla climbs into bed,
and her father begins.

Author Colin Shapiro is a real-life sleep disorder specialist. In the
foreword, Dr. Shapiro says that the inspiration for this book came when
his young daughter, Mahla, asked the very same question as the book’s
title. Perhaps only a sleep-disorder specialist would have delivered the
lecture little Mahla receives. In detail approaching minutiae, Dr.
Shapiro explains phenomena like polyphasic sleeping and rest activity
cycles and describes sleep experiments conducted with guppies and
crocodiles. Mahla hangs in to the end; other young readers may not. Sari
O’Sullivan’s fine illustrations cannot overcome the pedantic pace of
the text. Not recommended.