A Child's Good Night Book by Margaret Wise Brown

A Child's Good Night Book by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Jean Charlot

Rating: 5 stars

Our board book A Child's Good Night Book has a hole in it. Ben liked it so much he ate it.

So I am not a big fan of Good Night Moon. I admit it! But this book is great. We actually bought it for my sister's yet-to-be born son, but, um, well...it didn't quite make it to her house. Oops. This book is right up there with Karma Wilson's Sleepyhead for quality bedtime books, in my never humble opinion. It's a Caldecott winner, not surprisingly, but I don't understand why more people know about it. When we give it as a gift, people are surprised by it and then fall in love with it.

The storyline is wonderfully simple: Brown says good night to a bunch of different animals, ending their few sentences with "sleepy bunnies" or "sleepy wild things" or "sleepy sheep." The pictures are very nice and actually pretty sleepy, showing animals falling onto their paws, onto each other, into their mamma's laps, falling asleep. The book ends with "And the children stop thinking and whistling and talking. They all say their prayers and go to sleep. Sleepy children." The next two pages are just one large illustrations, and the book ends with a gentle prayer. I say gentle because it's a quietly Christian book, not obnoxiously religious or anything like that. For me, that makes it all the better, even though I'm stepping into that complicated topic of religion and children. I think I'll end this paragraph now before I have to draw lines in the sand...

The only funnily odd thing about the book is the page on wild things. If you had to choose three wild animals to write about and draw, what would they be? My thoughts immediately go to Africa, and images of zebras and lions and gorillas come to mind. Brown chooses lions and monkeys. Okay, I'm with you on these two. But then mice. Mice? Wild mice? I don't know...it makes me actually stop short and wonder what she was thinking. Maybe if she had made them all wild animals we see regularly--deer, raccoons, birds. Or maybe I just don't like mice because a few months ago I realized they were living in my toddler snack-infested car? Perhaps. Anyway, I still think this book is a gem despite the inclusion of mice as a wild animal.