When Sheep Cannot Sleep: the Counting Book

Despite its subtitle, this is a very unobtrusive counting book; it's perfectly possible to read the whole thing without counting anything at all if you don't want to. This is because it also has a story, about an insomniac sheep, which doesn't mention numbers and which therefore extends the book's appeal beyond the stage at which counting to 20 is an interesting activity. The pictures are entertaining (the sheep's expressions are wide-ranging and shown entirely by the one line that delineates his mouth ... very economical) and the story has that unexplained arbitrariness which children's writing and dreams can have. It was popular with the children, despite the rather unsatisfactory ending ... what is going to happen when the owners of the house come home and find a strange sheep in bed? Shades of Goldilocks!