It started with a phone call.
A tired daughter. A grandmother who loves her. And a little boy who had discovered, with the particular determination that only toddlers possess, that 5:30 in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to be awake and ready for the day.
What Diana Yacobi did next is exactly what the best grandmothers do: she told a story. Right there, spontaneously, over the phone, she wove together the kind of gentle, imaginative tale that only someone who deeply understands both children and the parents who are running on too little sleep could have thought to tell. It worked. And the rest, as they say, is a picture book.
Studio of Books is charmed to announce that Everyone Is Asleep is now live and ready to find its way into the homes, bedrooms, and early morning routines of families everywhere.
There is something wonderfully real about the origin of this story. It did not begin in a writer’s studio or with a carefully outlined manuscript. It began in the most ordinary and loving of places , a grandmother on the phone, trying to help. The story Yacobi told her daughter that day is, in its essence, the story in this book. Written down, shared with friends, and inevitably, because a story this charming simply demands to be seen as well as heard, brought to life with pictures.
That spontaneous, loving origin is present on every page. Everyone Is Asleep has the warmth of something told from the heart rather than crafted for the market. It feels like a grandmother’s voice. Gentle, unhurried, and absolutely certain that everything is going to be just fine.
For the little ones who wake before the sun and pad their way to their parents’ room in the early morning dark, this book is a soft and reassuring companion. It speaks directly to that experience, the world that feels so awake inside a small child at an hour when everyone else is still beautifully, frustratingly asleep, and meets it with imagination and warmth rather than frustration.
And for the parents and grandparents reading it aloud, it offers something equally valuable: a story that does the gentle work of settling an early riser back into the quiet of the morning, told in a voice that soothes as much as it entertains.
Everyone Is Asleep is the kind of book that earns a permanent place on the bedside table, pulled out at bedtime to set the mood for sleep, or on those early mornings when a little one needs something to hold onto while the rest of the house catches up. It is a gift for new parents navigating the particular exhaustion of sleep transitions, a perfect baby shower or birthday present, and a natural recommendation from every grandparent who has ever solved a problem with a well-timed story.
Diana Yacobi dedicated this book to her grandchildren, who, she notes with a grandmother’s quiet satisfaction, are these days all wonderful sleepers. Perhaps there is something to this story after all.
Diana Yacobi is a grandmother, a storyteller, and the kind of person who responds to a tired daughter’s phone call with exactly the right words at exactly the right moment. Everyone Is Asleep is her gift, first to her family, then to the friends who heard it and knew it needed to be shared, and now to every family navigating the beautiful, exhausting, deeply human terrain of raising little ones who are not yet entirely convinced that sleep is worth their time. She writes from love. It shows on every page.