Goodnight Songs by Margaret Wise Brown (2014) is a strange book.
Don’t get me wrong. After Goodnight Moon, I can understand publishers publishing anything she wrote. And the level of talent here is impressive.
However…it doesn’t really pull together. I imagine every library buying this, and people reading it at about 1/100th the rate they read Goodnight Moon.
As Amy Gary, the editor for Brown’s estate, explains in the introduction, she asked Brown’s sister after the author’s untimely death (at 42!) if Brown had left any unpublished manuscripts. The sister said there were some, in a trunk in the attic. Gary spent “months of cajoling” to get Brown’s sister Roberta Rauch to bring the trunk down. Once Gary got access to it, she found hundreds of pages that hadn’t been published.
These included Brown’s words put to music, often in collaboration with famous musical figures, such as Burl Ives.
Winnowing and editing resulted in the songs included here, which were illustrated by a dozen impressive artists. The songs were recorded, and the book comes with a CD.
The images are impressive. I will definitely be seeking out some of these artists.
I appreciate the goal of honoring Brown and her work.
And…hmm. The songs are much wordier than the wonder that was Goodnight Moon, wordier and more common. There’s a purity in Goodnight Moon that stands alone, and this book doesn’t match it. The illustrations are all well-done, but the change of style from page to page means there’s no unity.
So, great talents, mid-range results.
