Sprout has a lot of books – a consequence of being part of a family of avid readers and a grandchild of a retired teacher. While some are classics, some make us question our mental health, and others are just plain weird, there are a few that are both not particularly well-known and absolutely wonderful. They made their way onto his bookshelf in a variety of ways: received as gifts, picked up second-hand, and discovered at book festivals. They have both beautiful illustrations and lyrical text.
Hearing one of your favorite authors speak is one of the great joys of being a fan of authors who are still alive. For such purposes, we have the huge National Book Festival in D.C. Unfortunately, while it’s still attracting amazing authors, it hasn’t been nearly as appealing since it moved off the National Mall to the Convention Center. While it was easy to stand in the back of an outdoor tent and leave if Sprout got fussy, it’s much more difficult to be adaptable in a smallish, packed room. Fortunately, we’ve found a less glamorous but more inviting alternative – the Gaithersburg Book Festival. As Gaithersburg – the suburb just north of us – isn’t exactly known for its high culture or literary scene, I didn’t expect much. But my low expectations turned into pleasant surprise when we attended the Gaithersburg Book Festival last weekend.
Walking in, there were two very welcome things I noticed that the National Book Festival doesn’t have. The first was a gaggle of local food trucks serving a huge diversity of food. The National Book Festival has a couple of crummy tents selling boring tourist food like hot dogs and terrible pizza, so this was a big step up. We brought a picnic because we were trying to stay cheap, but I appreciated their presence.
The second was a table run by Book Crossing, a worldwide network of people who want to share and trade books with each other for free. Because I’m ridiculously susceptible to the lure of free books, I browsed the kids’ table. It doesn’t count if it’s for my son, right? I picked up a counting book with lovely nature photos (Counting on the Woods) and was moved to see that it was in honor of a little girl who had passed away. Reading her story on the family’s Facebook page , I was almost brought to tears. She was from suburban Virginia and died after getting hit by a car while riding her bike. As a family biking advocate and someone who wants the roads to be safe for everyone, I am both saddened by the circumstance and honored to be able to celebrate this little girl’s memory through this book.
Strolling through the Park that hosted the Festival, I was struck by how much larger it was than I expected. There were tents beyond tents, a sea of white points dotting the landscape. The children’s area was almost as large as the National Book Festival. While they didn’t have an entire Magic School Bus trailer or PBS tent, they did have Clifford the Big Red Dog, a whole tent of kids’ entertainment, and most importantly, a fenced playground. The tents were also a lot smaller, which made it much easier to hear and see the authors.
We wandered by the children’s entertainment tent just as they started a puppet show of Where the Wild Things Are. It was a very different set-up than I had ever seen – they used paper cut-outs of the characters, switching out the backdrops and lighting as the scenes changed. The puppetry was pretty simple, with the puppeteers wiggling around characters on sticks, but it was effective enough. Instead of having the characters speak, a narrator read the book, accompanied by music. Hilariously, the parts in the land of the Wild Things had an arrangement of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida as the background music! Not what I would have chosen, but its melodic darkness was surprisingly appropriate.
Next, we caught the ending of a talk by the author of Goatilocks and the Three Bears. The author recruited a few members of the audience to play the various parts in her book, including the three bears, the eponymous goat, and the house itself. As more than half of the “actors” were kids who didn’t quite know what was going on, it was pretty adorable. In the background, they showed the book’s illustrations, which involved said goat gobbling down not only Baby Bear’s porridge, but also his chair and bed!
Finally, the talk our family was waiting for arrived – the author and illustrator of Dragons Love Tacos! This book is so beloved that Sprout renamed Figment the Dragon to Taco because of it. The collaborators (Adam Rubin and Dan Salmieri) are a couple of youngish guys, close to Chris and my age. They joked that they knew what kids thought were funny not because they had kids but had never really grown up. (I admit that’s one reason I love reading to Sprout. At least the first time, most of his books are pretty awesome.) As an example, they mentioned that when they first met, one brought the other a taxidermied squirrel as a present, toting it around town the entire night. Anyone who has the guts to do that deserves some credit in my book.
They then offered us the first look anyone in the general public had at their new book to be released in September, Robosauce. Unlike Dragons Love Tacos, I immediately loved this book. I won’t ruin it, but it has a surprising and cool twist that makes it both unlike any children’s book I’ve ever seen and very much in the new tradition of using books as objects in ways that iPads can’t replicate. We’ll definitely be picking it up for Sprout when it comes out.
This is our blurry photo, but the one on Dan Salmieri’s Instagram is much better.
To keep the energy up – an hour-long talk for kids is long – they played a game. They asked members of the audience to name different objects that could be body parts of a monster, from a monster’s hair to its ears to its feet. The kids came up with some very interesting answers, from microphones for a head to cupcakes for hands. The best one was a oil tanker car for a neck, which was promptly followed by a very loud, long train whistle – the park backs right up to the railroad. As the kids volunteered ideas, Salmieri drew a cobbled-together beast, which ended up looking rather scary-adorable.
To wrap up our time at the festival, we made a stop at the playground while Chris got Sprout’s book signed and then headed out via the book tent. We already own Dragons Love Tacos, but I wanted to buy Sprout a commemorative book from the festival. In celebration of spring and gardening, I picked up Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt. The Gaithersburg Book Festival tent also had three major advantages over the one at the National Book Festival. It was run by Politics and Prose, one of our very few local bookstores, whereas the National one is run by Barnes and Noble. It had a little kids’ corner with chalk and crayons, which was great while we were waiting for Chris to check out. Lastly, it had a program where you could buy a book for the Book Festival to donate to a needy family. We decided to share the Dragons Love Tacos love with another kid who might not have his or her own library at all.
While I didn’t know what the Book Festival was going to be like at first, I appreciated its geographical closeness to us (rather than having to haul all the way into D.C.), intimacy, and kid-friendliness. We’re very fortunate to have such a great celebration of books so nearby!
“Where everyone is napping,” I read, as my baby crawled off my lap. Soon, he was across the room and out the door. With him gone, who was I reading to now? As cute as The Napping House is, it’s not the book I would pick for myself.
Babies are not easy audiences. Nonetheless, reading to them is essential. The American Pediatric Association appears to agree, with a recommendation to read to children – even babies – every day. While “every day” is tough, it’s still a good goal. But besides remembering to do so in a sleep-addled state, the idea of reading to a squirming baby can be intimating.
From my experience, here are a few tips for reading to very young children:
Did you know this is Children’s Book Week? My posts this week are going to focus on reading to children and children’s books, from the weird to the patience-building.
There are some things you remember from childhood as odd, blurry phantoms, cloaked in a haze of nostalgia and strangeness. You always wonder if what you remember was less weird – or perhaps more! – than you recall, warped by a child’s view on the world. If you’re really lucky, some of those things are books. I had a book growing up like that about dogs that lived in a city like humans, a canine version of friends. The main character had a bulldog as a boss and moved to a little stone cottage in the woods at the end. These days, my Mom and I can find no trace of this book on the Internet, not helped by the fact that our best guess at the title is the rather obvious but most likely wrong Dog City. Perhaps due to the loss of this work of my childhood, my Mom appears committed to keeping Sprout’s bookshelf well-stocked with picture books that are just plain odd. Between my mom’s contributions and others, he’s starting to have quite the collection of surreal books. None of them are nearly so awful as the ones on this Cracked.com list, but I hope a few leave their fond, vague traces in memory.
Edamame and Edapapa: This book is about a mommy bean and a daddy bean with a pet sesame seed. The only things that distinguish them from each other is that the mommy bean (Edamame – say it out loud) has a pearl necklace and the daddy bean has a luxurious mustache. One day, a paper crane drops off a baby bean for them. The End. It’s short, it’s based on a very silly pun and it’s adorable. But anything that involves talking plants – especially ones that use phrases like “teeny weeny beany” – is inherently weird.
The Secret Life of Squirrels:This book tells the story of a “very unusual squirrel” that cooks on his grill, plays the piano, reads, and cleans his house more than we do ours. None of this would be that odd for children’s literature, except that the book is made up of photos of real squirrels interacting with tiny domestic tableaux. The author actually handcrafted little beds, chairs, bookshelves and ice cream stands, smeared peanut butter on them and took photos of squirrels when they came to investigate. It’s the sort of hobby that if it was your friend, you might suggest joining a Meetup group. But as the author now has a best-selling children’s book, what do I know?
Dragons Love Tacos: According to this book, dragons love tacos and parties. But not spicy salsa, because then they get indigestion and will burn your house down. What makes this one odd is how it blatantly and purposely ignores all cultural trappings around a renowned mythological creature, creating an entirely new take in only a couple of pages. Also, the fact that the kid actually has his house burn down is kind of shocking. The success of the kid’s dragon taco party also raises a lot of questions – How did he advertise this party? Where do dragons get their community calendars? Have dragons just been going to Taco Bell in disguise (like the animals in Little Dee) and we’be been missing it the whole time? While I thought this book was kind of dumb at first, I now respect how weirdly radical it is. Sprout has also given it his ultimate approval – Figment the Dragon has now been renamed “Taco.”
I Want my Hat Back / This is Not My Hat: It is very rare when a children’s book involves one character eating another, especially when the protagonist is the one doing the eating. In both these books, a top predator gets its hat stolen (a bear and a large fish respectively), finds the perpetrator, and then presumably eats them. While it’s possible there was a peaceful negotiation (as one hopeful child asked the author in a story he told at the National Book Festival, “What happened to the bunny?”), it seems extremely unlikely. Especially because the bear in I Want My Hat Back says, “What bunny. I would never eat a bunny.” Riiiight. Perhaps the most bizarre thing is that you totally feel like the thief deserves it, even (and especially) in the book where the narrator is the thief!
Any Maurice Sendak book besides Where the Wild Things Are: Where the Wild Things Are is odd by itself, but his other books make it look like Dick and Jane. When we were at the library, I flipped through some of his books and was frankly shocked – not offended, just surprised – at how bizarre they were. From full frontal nudity to children kidnapped by goblins to cartoon homeless people, his books mine the depths of dark innocence. Some of them have the same feel as the old fairy tales, with things that lurk in the woods and pose true dangers to children. I suspect they are an acquired taste for adults, so used to relatively simple ideas in children’s stories and not the surreal grotesque. I need to give them a second look, quite honestly.
What are your favorite weird children’s books?
Did you know this is Children’s Book Week? My posts this week are going to focus on reading to children and children’s books, from the weird to the patience-building.
Saying that I am attached to my books is an understatement. I have two large Tupperware containers of books in my closet that I’ve owned since I was a child, ones that I either believed would be out of print or that I valued so deeply it pained me to get rid of them. But because I was a very precocious reader, very few of them are picture books. In fact, I have few distinct memories of reading picture books at all. This leaves me at a bit of a loss for now when it comes to passing on my beloved books to Sprout. Fortunately, there are a few that remained from my young childhood, mainly because my mom “borrowed” them for her classroom and brought them home when she retired. However, some are a bit different than I remember them.
Squiggly Wiggly’s Surprise: This was definitely the most hilariously disappointing of the bunch. Squiggly Wiggly is a worm (according to the book – he’s actually a caterpillar) that is represented by a little finger puppet that you push through holes in the book. However, his brown coloring and black rings make him look suspiciously like part of the male anatomy. Less funny but more unfortunate, Squiggly has some serious body image issues. While the story is ostensibly about him learning about different colors, most of it is actually him complaining that he’s drab and ugly, opining he could be something else. In the end, of course, he’s transformed into a beautiful butterfly. That’s kind of a crappy message though, as not everyone actually gets to become a butterfly. Squiggly should love himself for who he is. If you want caterpillar stories, stick with The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Bialosky Goes Out and Bialosky Stays Home: In contrast, these books were a pleasant surprise. I faintly remembered the books that used photos of a teddy bear as pictures, but before re-reading them, wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about them. Bialosky is like Winnie the Pooh’s long lost cousin: he makes grand plans that go array, loves honey, and is “a bear of very little brain.” In Bialosky Goes Out, he spends so long deciding on where to go and what to bring on a walk that it starts pouring before he has the chance to leave. In Bialosky Stays Home, he attempts to make cookies, but “tests” so much of the batter via nibbling that’s there isn’t any left to bake! In both books, he responds to his dilemma with a shrug and declaration that he’ll do better next time. While they lack the moral ambiguity of Winnie the Pooh, he has an irresistible attitude even when his plans completely fail. I’m very glad my mom kept them – they seem to be out of print now.
The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash: This is by far my favorite handed-down book, a tale of subversive fun narrated by a hilarious little girl (Meg). It has a sense of unbridaled, unashamed chaos. It starts off with the main character greeting her mother – who wears a very 1970s outfit combining no fewer than 3 floral patterns – after a trip to the farm. In the course of telling her mom about the trip, we find out that not only did a bale of hay fall on a cow, but that pigs ate the students’ lunches, motivated by the kids throwing their corn, due to the students running out of eggs to throw, all precipitated by Jimmy bringing his pet boa constrictor into the hen house. And the narrative – or Meg’s mom – doesn’t judge the kids at all for this behavior. Meg’s mom acts surprised, but far less than I suspect I’d be in the same circumstance. In fact, it’s very clear that Meg is a key instigator in it all of it – while she didn’t start it, the scene in the henhouse shows her with a full armful of eggs, ready to chuck at her classmates. The other thing I love is the fact the protagonist is female. Not only are girls underreprestened in children’s literature, but they tend to either fit into two stereotypes – full-on tomboys or very pink, very conventionally feminine girls. Meg and her fellow female classmates are neither. They all wear cute 1980s style dresses and skirts to the farm, but participate in the chaos as much – or more than – the boys. When Meg comes home, she changes into a car racing costume to pilot a homebuilt racecar with Jimmy (owner of the boa constrictor) and his new pet pig. But the best part is her non-plussed reaction to the day’s events -“I suppose it was exciting if you’re the kind of kid who likes class trips to the farm.”
A Very Young Dancer: I haven’t given this book to Sprout yet, as it’s rather text-heavy. Nonetheless, I look forward to reading it with him. It follows a young ballet dancer training in the School of American Ballet in New York and what she has to do before the big performance. Because my mom took me to the New York City Ballet every year (we lived near its summer home), I was a little obsessed with ballerinas as a kid. While I can’t force him to like anything, I want Sprout to be able to appreciate dance and theater, especially because they are often seen as “girly” interests. I hope this book can give him some insight into the hard work, athleticism, and beauty that goes into dance. Unfortunately, he won’t even be the second kid to use it. A little boy at my mom’s school was interested in dance and I gave her permission to take it to school. He then drew on it with crayon. At least I know it was loved.
What were your favorite books growing up? Did you have the chance to pass any of them on to your kids or kids you know?
Reading the Little Engine that Could to my toddler for the first time, I stopped short about halfway through. I stared at the book and thought, “The Little Engine that Could is female? Huh.”
Personally, the only thing I remembered before reading it with my kid was that the Little Engine said, “I think I can” a lot. (It was actually a lot less than I remembered.)
As it turns out, the core of the story is a groundbreaking feminist fable. While The Paper Bag Princess rightly gets great feminist cred for flipping the princess story on its head in 1980, the Little Engine that Could was a story about women helping each other and overcoming barriers together 50 years earlier than that. It’s a great little feminist fable for your train lovers of either gender.
My Book Club – quirky critical takes on children’s literature. Otherwise known as what happens when someone interested pop culture analysis has read the same bedtime story for the 100th time.
As anyone who has met a toddler knows, they have a very different, warped perspective on the world, at least in comparison to adults. Which is why absurdism is such a perfect match for them. So it makes sense that Goodnight Moon is a beloved favorite of that age group – it’s a master class in absurdism in only a few hundred words.
Wikipedia actually provides a surprisingly good, concise definition of absurdism: “Absurdism focuses on the experiences of characters in a situation where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question certainties such as truth or value.” Common elements include dark humor, nonsensical elements, irrationality, and situations that have little or no meaning. They generally have no moral conclusion and make no judgment on the character’s actions.
Goodnight Moon has many of these elements in abundance. There are hardly any characters, much less those who have an inherent purpose. The little bunny and “old lady whispering hush” appear to be the only things with any decision making ability, and even as they gradually change positions, there’s no clear explanation as to why. The best guess that can be made is that the little bunny is the nameless narrator, saying goodnight to all of the things in his room before going to sleep. As anyone who has ever tried to put a toddler to bed knows, this process will certainly bring certainties of truth, value and sanity into question.
The absurdity is further heightened by the number of times the narrator says goodnight and what they are saying goodnight to. More than half of the book consists of the narrator saying goodnight to some object or another. While a child saying goodnight to stuffed animals and perhaps the moon makes sense, saying goodnight to “nothing,” “air,” and “noises everywhere” indicates either a disturbing personification of ubiquitous objects or an endless echo of goodbyes that have no endpoint. Either is enough to force a grown adult to confront the irrationality of living with a small child in the first place.
The narrative further serves to disorient the reader and warp their perception of reality by having a slightly shifting visual perspective. At first, it appears that the book switches back and forth between showing the bunny’s bedroom and highlighting various objects in the bedroom, from a picture of the three bears to “a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush.” However, the bedroom setting changes slightly over time, showing the old lady saying “hush” there and then randomly not, the room getting dark, and the little bunny (finally) settling down to sleep. In addition to the changes over time, there are also slight changes in the framing of space. The frame of the page subtly zooms in and out of the room, creating an unsettling effect where you aren’t quite sure if what you are seeing is what you saw before. The pages that highlight objects often leave out key details that are in the larger picture. For example, the page focused on the mittens shows only the mittens on the drying rack, even though the larger picture shows the socks also on the rack. The Ugly Volvo hilariously deconstructs all of the other disturbing elements of the “great green room.”
Goodnight Moon even shows hints of postmodernism. As Jed at My Little Po-Mo says (yes, it is a critical analysis blog focused on My Little Pony): “Most of the time, we are unaware of the constructs that shape our reality, so postmodern works try to draw attention to the constructs in play, usually by subverting them.” Goodnight Moon touches on the construct of “what a classic piece of children’s literature is.” It does so by explicitly referring to three different children’s stories in the text and pictures. The first, the “three little bears sitting on chairs,” obviously refers to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a story that most children in English speaking countries know. The second is the picture on the wall of a mother bunny “fishing” for a baby bunny. Unlike almost all of the other decorations, this is not called out in the text and may not be something that many readers recognize. It is actually a picture from a different book by the same Writer/Artist team, The Runaway Bunny. The third reference is to Goodnight Moon itself, a copy of which is tucked away on the nightstand. These last two references are in clear comparison to the first, suggesting that the authors’ own works are comparable to Goldilocks. As Goodnight Moon has sold millions of copies, it certainly seems like their textual playfulness was prescient.
What makes Goodnight Moon brilliant is it’s use of absurdism to illustrate the toddler mindset. While the book can baffle parents, the utter ridiculousness of the repetition and overall approach seems perfectly normal to them. After all, they’re used to falling asleep in one place and waking up in another, an experience that would be terrifying for an ordinary adult. The world in general is radically weird for little ones; Goodnight Moon helps us enter their very strange perspective for just a little while.
Sprout loves books. He doesn’t read yet, but loves looking at books and spending time with them.
In fact, he can occupy himself for 10 minutes or so – a long time for a 16 month old – pulling books from his shelf and flipping through them one-by-one. He’ll stop at certain pages and focus on them, like a patron in an art gallery trying to figure out the meaning of a work. When he reaches the end, he’ll often flip back to those favorite pages, just to check if he missed something. Other pages he’ll speed past; some he skips altogether. It’s very clear he has strong opinions about what he finds interesting or not, something that runs in the family.
Unfortunately, this method of “reading” doesn’t translate well to pre-bed storytime. Often, he won’t let me hold the book or turn the pages because he wants to be in control. But I can’t read the text of the story with his chaotic jumping between pages. So we end up in an odd dance, where I try to read as fast as possible or very slowly, either skipping entire pages or repeating them multiple times, depending on his whim at the moment. In a books with rhyme schemes, I often stumble over the words because the rhythm is all off. He even flips books upside down, making it completely impossible to follow! Sometimes, I lose my patience, take the book from him, and turn the pages at my pace. Of course, he loses interest and pulls a different book off the shelf instead. His attitude seems to be: “Mommy, you can read the book you want to read, I’ll read the book I want to read.” That’s not exactly the point of storytime. So I’ve learned to adjust my reading style to suit someone whose enjoyment is entirely driven by the visuals and the cadence of my voice. Even if the story doesn’t make a lot of sense, I at least tell it enthusiastically.
In addition to bedtime, of all places, books play a major role on the changing table. He’s associating reading with pooping before he can even use the toilet! But giving him a book is the one consistent thing I can do to keep him from flipping over while I change his diaper. (Making funny noises stopped working a while ago.) To add to the benefit, his expression in the charging table is hilarious. He’s super serious, as if he’s a trader in a corner office reading the Wall St. Journal instead of a toddler with a dirty diaper flipping through a board book.
Sprout’s favorite books at the moment are an odd assortment of classics and modern stories. Most of them are not ones I bought – our families (especially my mom) have been very generous in building his library. All of his favorites are board books because we still don’t trust him with hardcover picture books yet. He’s mostly stopped munching on them (he was an actual bibliovore before), but he’s still fairly rough with the pages. We have a couple of books with inside covers that are torn because he was convinced that there was one more page to turn.
The Very Busy Spider: Eric Carle is one of the most artistic children’s illustrators ever, so this book is a pleasure to read, even for the fifth time in one night. While this one isn’t as famous as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, it’s actually more visually stunning, with each of the animals having it’s own unique combination of color and pattern. The actual texture of the spider’s web, which Sprout will show me by taking my hand and rubbing it on the page, makes visceral something we can’t even touch in real life without destroying. The repetitive structure – an animal asks if the spider wants to do something, she doesn’t respond because she’s too busy – means they you can skip pages without losing meaning, which is important with our aforementioned reading style. And it shows that spiders are beautiful, not scary! He loves The Very Lonely Firefly as well.
Let’s Sign, Baby: This one is kind of ironic because Sprout doesn’t know and probably won’t learn baby sign. Part of it is because Chris and I never really got around to learning it – teaching yourself another language is challenging enough, much less while you have a baby. Part of it is because even when we do remember to sign, Sprout isn’t looking at us, which rather defeats the point. This book has good explanations of the different signs, but I can’t tear his eyes away from the page to demonstrate them. I think he just likes the cartoons of the kids and babies.
Harry the Dirty Dog: This is one that I probably would never have bought myself, but it was my father-in-law’s favorite story when he was little, so Chris’s family bought it. The illustrations are adorable, even if the family is so 1950s suburban stereotypical. However, I don’t know how to feel about a book that says if you get too dirty, your family won’t recognize you. As Sprout gets older, we’ll stick with emphazing how good Harry is at problem solving.
The Big Red Barn: A far less well-known book by the same author as Goodnight Moon. This book about farm animals is cute, but the rhythm and rhyming structure grates on my nerves, even when it’s read correctly. It obviously has a structure, but whenever I read it, it just sounds “off.” Plus, it has the multiple ending problem a la Lord of the Rings – it should end three pages before it does. Needless to say, it’s no Goodnight Moon.
Bedtime for Chickies: This is an absurdly adorable book. It’s about three chicks that find all sorts of reasons not to go to bed, exasperating their pig, cow and sheep caretakers. The ending of the chicks only falling asleep once they are in their caretakers’ embrace hits a little too close to home, but the illustrations and the chickies’ dialogue is overwhelmingly cute.
Baby Faces: This book, which is just a series of photos of babies with captions describing their state of being (happy / sad, clean / dirty, etc) was a favorite when he was really little and has come back around again. When he was tiny, I think he just liked looking at the photos of other babies. Now, I think he’s realizing that the different expressions relate to different emotional states and finds those distinctions interesting.
What are or were your kids’ favorite board or baby books?
Children’s literature is often not meant to represent reality – I love fantastical, imaginative works. But one place it really falls down is its failure to represent the vast diversity of children, in both the world and America. Considering half the population is female and there were more non-white babies born in the U.S. in 2011 than white babies, children’s literature (especially classic books like Dr. Seuss) is awfully male and white. Unfortunately, this lack of representation means that when female or minority kids read, they don’t see anyone like them. Similarly, when white, male kids read, they only see people like them as protagonists. Then, when books do have diverse characters, they often make a big deal about it, focusing on the ethnicity of the characters rather than allowing them to be characters in their own right. All of which is to say that Ten Nine Eight is refreshing to read.
Ten Nine Eight is a bedtime book, a simple genre that basically follows a character going to bed, who is meant to be a stand-in for the child being read to. The quintessential bedtime book is Goodnight Moon, but there’s also Night Night Little Pookie, Bedtime for Chickies, and the geographically based series Count to Sleep [City Name]. Ten Nine Eight follows a dad putting his little girl to bed. It counts the different things in her room, ranging from her “10 washed and warm little toes” to her fuzzy stuffed animals. The illustrations have just the right combination of realism and nostalgic childhood softness. The counting down is a gentle, quiet game perfect for helping little ones fall asleep. The little girl’s room is full of telling, relatable details, from the “7 shoes in a row” (the cat has the missing one) to the seashells making up a homemade mobile. The book earned a Caldecott Honor award, which it totally earned for its simple artistry.
What’s particularly unique is that story is not only about a dad with his daughter (who are usually absent, mean or at best incompetent in children’s entertainment) and they are both black. The story doesn’t mention either of these facts; they’re just presented as a part of everyday life, which they are for millions of families. But when a big deal is still made about a photo of a black dad braiding one daughter’s hair while holding another in a baby carrier in 2014, this book must have been radical in 1983.
So if you want a lovely bedtime story with some unassuming, welcome diversity, Ten Nine Eight is for you.
“No Adults Allowed” could be slapped on the cover of most literature dealing with children’s adventures. Besides the many thematic reasons for making adults absent, there’s the simple fact that society sees adventuring and parenthood as antithetical. But saying it’s impossible to go on adventures with kids actually creates a harmful, false choice.
