by Moe Zilla

Created on: May 28, 2010

"Let's go for a walk, along the block,
and see what we can see..."

There's something unique about the illustrations for "A Good Night Walk." The perspective for each picture is always exactly the same - it's the opposite side of the street, as seen by a traveling pedestrian! Elisha Cooper draws all the simple sights that you'd see on a leisurely stroll through a neighborhood. And the right edge of a picture on one page will usually becomes the left edge of the picture on the next!

Of course, this turns the story into a what's almost a series of captions for Cooper's grand watercolored pencil drawings. "The leaves of the oak tree bend in the wind. Its high branches bounce a pair of chattering squirrels." But the simple illustrations still adopt a realistic distance - so part of the fun of the book is identifying the things described in the text.  (The chattering squirrels are just two tiny figures at the end of one branch up in the tree's far right side...)

The book is suprisingly entertaining - and its gentle tone is part of its charm. The first page notes that the good night walk happens "before it's time for bed," suggesting that the book's wide, open-ended watercolor drawings suggest are aimed at soothing a child to sleep. The tiny squirrels leave the oak street's broad branches, and then "chase each other from the telephone wire to the clothesline to the flag." It takes some studying to find each item in the drawings - almost make this book into a preschool version of "Where's Waldo." The squirrels startle some birds on a feeder, while further along the walk under an apple tree, there's a black-and-white cat resting in the shade.

And the walk continues...

Young children might miss the fact that the sights on the street are all connected, but the text tries to start each sentence with something described on the previous page. ("The screend oor opens and shuts, echoing over the lawn. The boys mow the law and fill the trash cans with the cut grass...")  Parents reading the book out loud might want to call attention to the fact that the last building usually reappears at the left edge of the next drawing. And when the street finally ends - with a house by the bay - the author suggests "Let's turn and walk back the way that we came."

And then all the sights from the neighborhood walk get re-visited...in reverse order!

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