Ruby Reads (17)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about books I’ve encountered when wearing my Poppa hat. Here are some of the wonders I’ve encountered since last I blogged about them.

Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd, Goodnight Moon (1947)

Anyone who has worked in children’s literature has heard of Goodnight Moon. It’s an absolute classic US picture book for young children, which I can now tick off my Shame List. The person who sold it to me said he’d had to hide his daughter’s copy because she demanded it so relentlessly. Yet he claimed to still like it. I don’t know what I was expecting – maybe something full of saccharine statements of maternal love – but actually it’s terrific. A tiny rabbit in a big bed says goodnight to all the wonderful things in the bedroom and outside the window.

Leslie Patricelli, On My Potty (Walker Books 2010)

If Goodnight Moon can be read as a text with a manipulative subtext (a reading encouraged by a page at the end of our copy that list dozen hints for how to get your child to sleep), On My Potty can’t be read any other way. No actual potty has yet appeared in Ruby’s life, so the book is a bot on the theoretical side, but there’s no doubt that it’s meant as a tool for toilet-training. It’s charming and silly as well. Whether it succeeds in its aims remains to be seen in our case.

Laura Bunting, illustrations by Philip Bunting, Kookaburras Love to Laugh (Koala Book Company 2018)

I imagine all two-year-old people have enthusiasms. Ruby is loves kookaburras. Two of her recurring sentences are, ‘Kookaburra in tree’ (that one is sometimes a question, or perhaps a request) and, ‘Kookaburra fly away.’ The plot of Kookaburras Love to Laugh may be a little beyond her: there’s a serious kookaburra who leaves his family in search of more serious birds. He ends up with some garden flamingoes who are completely serious but utterly boring, and goes back home, converted to the enjoyment of laughter. So the plot is OK, especially given that his family also make adjustments to meet his needs, but the real appeal is page after page of kookaburras and the frequent need for kookaburra imitations from the reader.

Jon Klassen, This Is Not My Hat (Walker 2012)

The second in John Kalassen’s wonderful minimalist hat trilogy. In the first book, I Want My Hat Back (link is to my review), a bear goes on search of his hat and finally finds and deals with the thief. This one tells a similar story from the thief’s point of view. A small fish has stolen the hat of a very big fish and is confident of getting away with it. But the reader who notices small details such as the direction the big fish is looking or the angle of a bystander crab’s nippers knows that the confidence is misplaced. The humour is sly, and the images are brilliant.

Jon Klassen, We Found a Hat (Walker 2016)

This is the third in the series. Two tortoises find a hat in the desert. One hat, two tortoises. They decide that that won’t work so they walk away, but one of them looks back longingly and when the other goes to sleep he sneaks back towards the hat … Unlike the other two books this one doesn’t end with retribution, but with a splendid, richly satisfying imagined resolution to this specific sharing dilemma. (We are witnessing many sharing dilemmas in playgrounds.)

Ruby’s father and grandfather both love these hat books. I think Ruby quite likes them.

Kookaburras Love to Laugh is the thirty-sixth book I’ve read for the 2019 Australian Women Writers Challenge.