Wake Me Up in 20 Coconuts
by Laurie Keller ; illus. by the author
Primary    Little, Brown    40 pp.       g
9/22     978-0-316-31196-0     $18.99

“I can’t ask her what it means. Then she’ll know I don’t know.” The resident of apartment 2C (skinny bright-blue walking rectangle with a red bow tie and a thatch of brown hair) prides himself on being “the know-it-all neighbor.” When 2B (pink teardrop with red high-tops at the end of stick legs) asks 2C to “wake me up in 20 coconuts,” though, 2C is thrown for a loop. Keller’s wacky mixed-media illustrations set the tone and the scene: a red-brick apartment building inhabited by a variety of cartoony characters who mainly communicate by shouting out their front windows. 2C tries logic (“How many coconuts in a minute?”), removing the sock and noisy chicken from his ear, and getting his brain washed, all with the hope that the meaning of “coconut time” will become clearer. The existential crisis reaches its ridiculously exaggerated crescendo when 2C finally admits (to the whole building) that he doesn’t know what 2B is talking about. And this is where the silliness has been leading: “It’s all right to say ‘I don’t know,’ 2C. It doesn’t mean that you’re not smart.” An encouraging note provides more details on the benefits of owning what we don’t know.

From the November/December 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.