Nothing New

Brown, Margaret Wise. 1947. GOODNIGHT MOON. Ill. by Clement Hurd. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 978-0694003617

Here I go, pretending I have something new to say about Goodnight Moon. What more can be said of this powerhouse children’s classic that hasn’t been said by smarter people with bigger words over the past 66 years? What new insight could I possibly bring? The very thought.

Let’s just state the obvious, shall we? It’s no big secret that the mouse eats the mush in the end, moving on its parallel course as a separate graphic narrative. It’s not hard to observe that the clock at the beginning of the story shows 7:00, and on the last page shows 8:10. The copy of Goodnight Moon on the coffee table is hard to miss. Then there are the pictures on the wall from other books, like The Runaway Bunny, also written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd). Are you bored with the same old information yet? My mundane interpretations of the use of light in Hurd’s artwork have probably been the subject of someone’s doctoral dissertation, and my thoughts about the telephone as a metaphor for unavoidable change would be one in a sea of better written, better researched opinions. The only thing that could possibly make the book any better is if a few more pages were in color, and I hesitate to say even that.

Here’s what I can say. I didn’t read Goodnight Moon until I started reading to my own children 10 years ago. With my first daughter, we discovered all the little details together, discovering excitedly the course of the mouse, the clock, the moon. We talked about what it might mean that the lamp light goes out but the dollhouse light stays lit (I think it's a symbol of the imagination, but what do I know). Reading this book and unraveling its hidden joys with my daughter was an incredible experience, and taught us both to look at picture books differently from that point on. I shared the book a second time with my other daughter a few years later, leading her subtly to her own process of discovery. Watching them both get excited about this book showed me first-hand the power of Goodnight Moon in particular, and of quality picture books in general. Maybe it was nothing new, but it was all new to us, and that was enough.