A Good Night Walk by Elisha Cooper

A Good Night Walk by Elisha Cooper

Rating: 4 stars

Elisha Cooper is quickly becoming one of my favorite illustrators.  His images seem to be sketched quickly but the people seem to move, the trees seem to sway, and the animals seem to breathe.  My husband really likes Farm and Beach, though I think they are beyond even Lorelei's impressive attention span; I think they are the segue way to chapter books they are so long!  Those books are DK-like in their details and information, but A Good Night Walk is a great bedtime book.

Maybe because we live in the woods, the neighborhood setting of this book makes Lorelei more interested in it.  On our night walks, we see fireflies and hear owls and listen to the rustling leaves and not much else.  While I wouldn't change that, there is something amazingly and magically alluring about Cooper's retro drawings that make me pine for a neighborhood like those in his pictures.  The author takes a walk, presumably with his child/ren, along a sidewalk, where screen doors open and close, with smells of apple pie and sounds of dogs barking.  He simply describes what he sees, nothing more, nothing less.  Friendly waves, chasing squirrels, a pick-up game of baseball....somehow I think of my parents' hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania.  His images are just nostalgic and beautiful.

I'm too young to appreciate the difficulty of the late 1940s, and early 1950s when my grandparents began to raise their children.  I know there were plenty.  But they were surrounded by friends and family--and all of their lives were intertwined in those apple pies and baseball games and picnics. 

Somehow Elisha Cooper with his slow words, "Let's take a walk, a walk at night, and see what there is to see" sticks in Lorelei's and my imagination.  For different reasons, but...that's what makes this a really good book.