The Midnight Farm

The Midnight Farm is a nearly perfect bedtime story. Once again, I've chosen a book that is out of print, but plenty of used copies are available on Amazon. I've written before about books that create a mood, and this one is an excellent example of the genre. Charlie is usually wide awake when we finish reading his bedtime stories, but this one makes even him a little bit sleepy.

The story is simple and intuitive. A mother gets her son ready for bed by walking around the farm with him, looking at all the animals ready for the night. Some of the animals are settling in to sleep, while others are nocturnal and engaged in their activities.

The book is written in very nice poetry, which contributes to the mood. I'm sure there's a name for this form, but I don't know it -- the first line of each verse is the same as the last line of that verse, with a different beginning. Each verse begins, "Here is the dark of [place]" and it ends, "In the dark of the [place]." Here's one verse to give you a sample:

Here is the dark of the maple tree
Where a raccoon family, one, two, three,
Is making a home in a place that was free
In the dark of the maple tree.

I didn't notice until I was on page five or six of my first reading, but this is also a counting book. After the introductory verse, each page counts up one more animal, to ten. We start with one dog, then two cats, three raccoons, four geese, five horses, etc. This is very subtle, without calling attention to it and without the numbers printed on the pages.

My only complaint about this book is that two of the verses don't rhyme properly. It's very disappointing, since the rest of the book (and the poetry!) is so fantastic, and I wish the author could have fixed this. One verse rhymes stove/glove/love, and another rhymes pond/around/sound. It's annoying, but I'm willing to overlook it because the book is so wonderful in other ways.

The illustrations are also amazing. They are extremely realistic paintings. The people and animals look almost like you could reach out and touch them. The colors are varied, yet muted for evening and bedtime. Just looking at the pictures here is a real treat.

This is a wonderful book for a quiet and peaceful bedtime or naptime story. Charlie sometimes asks for it during the day, too, and then he likes to count the animals and point out the ones that aren't mentioned in the text ("One, two, three raccoons, and an owl!"). I really can't believe this one went out of print.

The Day the Babies Crawled Away

When I first read The Day the Babies Crawled Away, I thought the pictures were stunning but the text was pretty lame. Apparently, I am not a two-year-old, because the moment Charlie first heard it read to him, he was enthralled. And after just a couple of readings, it began to grow on me. This is nowhere near great literature, but it's not annoying or boring, either. And the pictures definitely make up for it.

The pictures! All of the characters, scenery, and details are done in black silhouette, intricately detailed. There are many details to notice--butterflies, bees, blackberries on a bush, caterpillars--all pure black silhouettes. What really grabs you, though, are the luminous backgrounds. All the jeweled colors of the sky appear, subtly different page after page, giving the feeling that the entire book is happening at sunset even though we see the tones slowly change from day to evening over the course of the story. The book is just gorgeous to look at.

The story is pretty cute. The adults aren't paying attention one day, and the babies all crawl away. The only person who notices is a very young boy wearing a fireman's hat. He chases after the babies, trying to get them to come back. The babies crawl through forests and caves, take rides on birds, and end up at the bottom of a cliff before the boy catches up with them. He then takes over a parental role, finding them food and serving as a pillow for their nap, before leading them back home to their grateful parents. Nice and free-range: The babies get along reasonably well without their parents, and it's a little kid who steps up, takes responsibility, and successfully brings them home.

So, what is it about the text? I think it's a bit choppy in parts ("I say! What a day / When the babies crawled away.") and not very interesting. Charlie, on the other hand, found it immediately compelling for two reasons. The most important thing is that the book is written in second person, putting the child-reader in the role of the little boy saving the day ("Remember the way / You tried to save the day? / You hollered, 'HEY! / You babies, STAY!'"). Charlie becomes very excited, pointing to the silhouette of the boy and announcing, "That's me! That's Charlie!" and sometimes repeating the little boy's lines of dialogue. The repeated use of the word "remember" draws the child into the story even further, framing the whole thing as a retold story that happened to him personally just the other day.

The other thing Charlie loves about the text are all the exclamatory phrases he can add to his vocabulary: I say! What a day! Nice play! Okay! Hey, hey! He picked these up much faster than I expected.

The upshot is, I was skeptical at first, but this is definitely a worthy addition to our library.

Just a Little Critter Collection

There are approximately nine million books in the "Little Critter" series, and I readily admit, I have not read them all. The ones I have read range from fantastic to very boring. That's why I was pleased to discover Just a Little Critter Collection, a hardcover collection of seven really excellent Little Critter stories. There is no hit-or-miss here. Every single one in the book is great.

Most of this review discusses the stories, but before I launch into that, I want to mention the totally cute illustrations for a moment.  These are not great works of art or anything, but they are adorable and interesting. There are many background details to discover, particularly a spider, cricket, and mouse that follow Little Critter around to many places. The facial expressions on the parents and kids are also priceless.

Each of these stories is also available as an individual paperback. The included stories are:

• Just for You
• When I Get Bigger
• I Was So Mad
• All by Myself
• Just Go to Bed
• Just a Mess
• I Just Forgot

One of the major overriding themes of these stories is a free-range childhood. The main character, who I guess is the Little Critter himself, is probably around four or five years old (old enough to have a little sister who is a kid, not a baby), but his parents give him a huge amount of freedom and responsibility. In Just for You alone, his mother lets him cook eggs, mop the floor, put away the dishes, carry the groceries home from the store, mow the lawn (with an old-style mechanical mower), and set the table for dinner. In every picture, the mother is in the background, looking on, encouraging Little Critter to do things on his own. When he messes things up, which he does repeatedly, she is clearly aggravated but always kind and helpful. This is also the main story of the rather obviously-titled All By Myself.

Despite his age-appropriate freedom, Little Critter has clear rules and limits imposed by his parents. When I Get Bigger is about his fantasies of the exciting things he'll do when those limits are removed. All of them are very reasonable things that bigger kids can do ("I'll go to the corner store by myself."), or at least could back in the 1970s ("I'll have a two-wheeler and a paper route. I'll make lots of money.").

Combining both free range philosophy and good parental limits, I Was So Mad describes what happens one day when Little Critter was prevented from doing a series of activities he wanted to do (putting frogs in the bathtub, climbing inside his sister's dollhouse, painting the exterior walls of the house, and juggling eggs, among other things), and decided that he was so mad he would run away. His parents look on in quiet amusement as he packs his wagon full of toys and cookies and heads out the door. But right outside, he runs into his friends and decides to go play baseball with them instead of running away.

The two ideas also intermingle in the last story in the book, which is my favorite, I Just Forgot. Parents sometimes have trouble understanding exactly how many things a kid has to learn and remember. Things that are second-nature to us--like turning off the bath water when we are done!--are just one more habit that a kid is in the process of forming. Little Critter is doing his best to remember all the things he needs to do, but he only gets about half of them right. The writing in this story is just adorable and captures a little kid's voice perfectly. Some of the things are presented straightforwardly ("I put my dishes in the sink after breakfast, but  I forgot to put the milk away."), and others are almost laugh-out-loud funny ("I didn't forget to feed the goldfish. He just didn't look hungry. I'll do it now, Mom.").

I can totally relate to Little Critter's parents. They rarely say anything in these stories, but their facial expressions and body language always mirror exactly what I'd be feeling if my kid did whatever it is that Little Critter is doing just then. They are by turns proud, amused, frustrated, angry, worried, annoyed, and loving. But they generally stay in the background, letting Little Critter work out his problems for himself. This is most evident in Just a Mess, when Little Critter can't find his baseball mitt and his mother suggests that maybe he'll find it if he cleans his unbelievably cluttered room. She refuses to help, commenting, "You made the mess, so you can clean up the mess." You go, Mom Critter! In the whole story, she only intervenes to prevent Little Critter from washing his bedroom floor with the garden hose.

And parents are not perfect. I completely identify with Dad Critter as he gets increasingly annoyed with Little Critter's refusal to cooperate with the bedtime routine and ends up shouting "Just go to bed!"

Yet the love always shines through in these books. No matter how frustrated and annoyed the parents and child get with each other, there is always a tender moment. You just know that this is a strong, close-knit family. To a parent, one message of this book is that kids can be aggravating as heck, but they are still awesome. To a kid, the message is that parents can be aggravating as heck, but they are still awesome. Capturing both of those messages at once is, in my opinion, brilliant.

Good Night, Gorilla

Good Night, Gorilla is an adorable little nearly-wordless book. A zookeeper walks through the zoo at night, saying goodnight to all the animals. ("Good night, [animal name]" are the only printed words.) Unbeknownst to him, the gorilla has stolen his keys, slipped out of his cage, and followed him around, letting out each animal after he says goodnight. The animals all follow the zookeeper home and curl up for the night in his bedroom. But the zookeeper's wife notices, and leads them all back to the zoo... except for the sneaky gorilla.

I think this was the first wordless book we got. I picked it up at a garage sale, and Charlie immediately fell in love with it, setting off a major phase of obsession with gorillas and monkeys. I'm not kidding when I say we probably read this fifteen times a day at one point.

I originally assumed that this story was decades old, for a couple of reasons. The style of drawing looks very classic 1950s, the house (and the wife in a nightgown and cap) also look very old-fashioned, and the zoo animals are kept in old-fashioned cages with bars, not at all like a modern zoo. But it turns out that it was written in 1994 and just stylized to look like the past. In any case, I will readily call this a modern classic.

The story has the potential to be very boring for adults, since it's repetitive and the illustration style is fine but not particularly gorgeous. But actually, there are a lot of "visual jokes" that you won't spot on the first (or third, or fifth) reading but that you'll notice in the background later. Just to give one example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, since I don't want to spoil it for you, the elephant has a Babar doll lying on the floor of his cage. Things like that. I always managed to notice a new one right when I was at the point of extreme aggravation at having to read the book "one more time" for Charlie.

Cute story, obsessive interest from child, and interest thrown in for the parents -- that all adds up to my highest recommendation.