Slumber Party
Margaret Wise Brown’s ‘Goodnight Songs,’ and More
I
don’t know about yours, but my bedtime reading does not generally —
ever, actually — include books about falling asleep. This should seem
strange only to young children, for whom the provision of books about
sleeping and not sleeping has captured a large slice of the picture book
market. Dr. Robert Needlman, who revised and updated Dr. Benjamin
Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” once told me that the purpose of bedtime
stories is to give the imagination a kind of way station between
wakefulness and sleep that facilitates an easier slip into
unconsciousness. (We were talking about young children, but I think this
goes for all of us.) So books for bedtime, sure. But why about?
Four new books, swaddled in practically identical shades of sleepy-time
blue, attempt to make a case for the genre. Some do a better job than
others.
“Goodnight
Songs” is a collection of verses, most previously unpublished, by
Margaret Wise Brown — herself of course the author of the bedtime
classic “Goodnight Moon,” itself the progenitor of countless imitators
eager to become the next baby shower staple. This collection won’t be it
— where “Goodnight Moon” is all concentrated strangeness and mystery,
the poems in “Goodnight Songs” are individually repetitive and
carelessly developed sprouts of whimsy. With each of the 12 selections
illustrated by a different children’s book artist — including Sophie
Blackall, Dan Yaccarino, Eric Puybaret and Melissa Sweet — the book
lurches more than progresses from spread to spread. According to an
editor’s note, Brown had conceived these poems as song lyrics, and a
compact disc of pallid but grating renditions is duly included in the
kind of package that suggests you’re getting more for your money than
you actually are.
From
the Italian team of the writer Giovanna Zoboli and the illustrator
Simona Mulazzani, and translated by Antony Shugaar, “The Big Book of
Slumber” is a humbler and more consistent effort, cataloging in rhyme
and picture the sleeping arrangements of an entirely peaceable kingdom.
Fancifully so, what with the camels in bunk beds and doves on the chaise
longue. The juxtapositions are funny but unfrantic, gentled by the
sweet couplets (“Dormouse and badger in beds side by side. / ‘I like
your pajamas,’ friend badger confides”) and piquant but restful
paintings. The matter-of-factness with which a fox sleeps under a
star-strewn baby-blue duvet beneath the purple sky offers both
strangeness and comfort. The book lacks shape — you could put the pages
in any order and not notice the difference — but does not want for mood.
Lilli
Carré's “Tippy and the Night Parade” is of a size and style more
intended for independent reading than sharing. Toon Books is a
grandchild of Raw magazine, the underground comics venue founded in 1980
by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, now the
art editor of The New Yorker and Toon’s publisher and editorial
director. While respectably hardcover and didactically appended with
suggestions for reading guidance, “Tippy” uses the paneled art and
speech balloons of comics and displays its downtown roots through an
offbeat color palette (cantaloupe, chocolate and gunmetal blue), blithe
generalization of form and a bed-headed heroine who looks as much the
hipster gamin as she does a little girl. The narrative, though, is
completely old-school children’s book: An uncomprehending Tippy is
chastised by her mother for the messy state of her bedroom, filled as it
is with a peacock, bunny, turtle and various detritus from the natural
world. Who will not see that these are but souvenirs of Tippy’s
somnambulistic wanderlust? She makes another trip the very same night,
this time counting among her haul a goat, crab and bear. While the
details of Tippy’s nighttime walk are mildly funny — and maybe mildly is
as funny as you want at bedtime? — there’s not really enough going on
here to make a child want to go through the story more than once. Maybe
the rules are different for comic books (although we certainly reread
them with avidity), but any bedtime book worthy of the name needs to
work its magic over and over again, like bedtime prayers.
The
little girl of “Hannah’s Night” is also a night wanderer, but her
territory is the secure confines of her home, and she’s wide awake. As
with her previous books, “Emily’s Balloon” and “The Snow Day,” the
Japanese author-illustrator Komako Sakai finds picture-book drama by
letting a young child’s perceptions — of a new balloon, unexpected
weather — play out unfiltered by adult perspective. Hannah finds herself
surprised to wake while it’s still dark, and at a bit of a loss for
what to do, goes off to have a pee (with cat Shiro companionably doing
his own business in the litter box next to the toilet). She then raids
the fridge (milk for Shiro, cherries for her), looks out at the moon and
daringly borrows her big sister’s doll right from under her sleeping
nose, securing the sister’s music box and some art supplies while she’s
at it. It’s a big night. Rather than throwing about some nocturnal
nonsense to give Hannah something to do, the book allows the girl’s own
resourcefulness to provide the story, demonstrating a respect for
toddlers and their world matched by the pictures, serious blues and
purples warmed by comfortably scratchy lines and anchored by
protectively rounded borders. Exciting but safe, Hannah’s world is one
that would-be dreamers will welcome as a first step into sleep.
Whatever
it takes. But there’s no reason to think kids need to read or hear
about bedtime at bedtime any more than you do. If we recognized that
children read for the same reasons as adults — the walk into dreamland
being among them — the books we intend for their pleasure might look a
whole lot different.
GOODNIGHT SONGS
By Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrated. 32 pp. Sterling. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)
THE BIG BOOK OF SLUMBER
By Giovanna Zoboli
Illustrated by Simona Mulazzani
Translated by Antony Shugaar
28 pp. Eerdmans. $16. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)
TIPPY AND THE NIGHT PARADE
Written and illustrated by Lilli Carré
32 pp. Toon Books/Candlewick Press. $12.95. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)
HANNAH’S NIGHT
Written and illustrated by Komako Sakai
32 pp. Gecko Press. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)