In the Night Garden: The Bedtime Book

Product Information

Oh, golly. Um, I guess just to look deeply when you’re out in the world and looking at books. Yeah. I find that to be a very meaningful part of my life. I've read parts of The Arabian Night about thirty years ago. In the Night Garden succeeds in recapturing that sense of wonder, of exploring incredibly rich, exotic cities, meeting fantastic creatures, magicians, kings and vagabonds, sailing to mythical shores or descending into mysterious caverns. And Catherynne Valente managed this without copying or borrowing from the original tales. I am. Do you know who Rachel Vail is? She’s an author. She does a lot of YA books, but also some picture books, and she lives four floors up from me, just coincidentally. So, she’s my walking partner, and she has a pet tortoise, and I have a pet rabbit. So, for the last ten years, we’ve been joking that we should do a book about tort and hare. And so, we’re working on an early reader series about friendship and about tort and hair. She’s a very accomplished, wonderful writer with a lot of humor and emotional intelligence, and nuance. Yeah, well, I’m glad that you’re asking it again because I think, on the face, it’s a good night book, right? It’s sort of a nighttime night story. So, I guess I just really do hope that the message of facing the unknown isn’t so buried that it doesn’t get noticed. I hope that comes through somehow.

Sure. They’re often quite intentional. I don’t have a book. Should have a book in front of me. I don’t. Um, well, one thing that’s always in every single one of my books is Thea, my daughter’s name. T-H-E-A So, um, there was an artist, Al Hirschfeld, when I was little, and he had a daughter named Nina. So, he would do these wonderful ink calligraphic ink drawings, and there would be a number down by his signature, like three or six. And that was how many Ninas were hidden in the calligraphic lines of his drawing. And as a kid, I don’t know. I just loved that. My particular favorites were the witches drowning in light, the ones who would not die, the irascible pirate mermaid, and all the selkie stories. The dog monks were a great treat as well.One reviewer mentioned murky mythology and it’s exactly that. Don’t expect a lot of cohesion. Meandering. Sometimes reminded me Ovid's Metamorphoses with its theme, but even that wasn't consistent. But I suppose it was THE theme. And I think I liked the first story more, although both of the finales were anticlimactic. Fans of creation myths, fractured fairy tales and stories in the key of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler will find plenty to love in this wondrous book of interweaving tales. And then I just use really; it’s all really rudimentary materials. It’s old ephemera. So, I collect stuff, and I love that they come with these stories built in. So, some of them are really old, from the 18 hundreds, and they’re ledger books from an old grocery store. Some of them are letters. And again, I just love the poignancy of them having this kind of mystery of where they came from. And then some of them are J. Crew catalogs, which, unfortunately, J. Crew has stopped making them, or magazines or something that I find on the street that just has a good number on it. They take and take and what does it matter? No one asks the taken; they just forget, they just forget, they disappear and everyone forgets.”

Publisher’s Book Summary: A gentle, collage-illustrated bedtime read about the often mysterious and always beautiful experiences to be found in nighttime spaces. The picture book presents itself as a gentle, collage-illustrated bedtime read that explores the often mysterious yet beautiful experiences that take place in nighttime spaces. Carin kindly discusses her creative process for creating collages, showcasing her expertise in producing such intricate artwork. She also delves into the impact she hopes In The Night Garden will have on its readers, inviting listeners to indulge in this fantastic piece of children’s literature. Listen to the InterviewIn the Garden" lives an almost woman abandoned as a toddler when an inky mask appeared across her eyes. Catherynne M. (Why? Are not middle initials customarily to distinguish common names?) Valente writes like a computer programmed to arbitrarily join a list of adjectives with nouns, and randomly extract one role as narrator to generate a new not-story. I thought this was a very clever and unique book. At least, I’ve never read anything like it. It tells a lot of stories, I couldn’t say how many, but definitely more than a dozen. However, this is not an anthology. It’s layer upon layer upon layer of related stories nested inside each other. Join Igglepiggle, Upsy Daisy, Makka Pakka and the Tombliboos as they settle down for bedtime in these four mini board books, which also make a fun jigsaw puzzle!

Reading this book has left me practically speechless. Almost anything I could say about it will fall flat in the sheer enormity of the experience. It's almost time for bed in the Night Garden, but first Igglepiggle wants to say goodnight to all his friends. What a good idea! In the Night Garden is a magical picture-book place that exists between waking and sleeping in a child’s imagination. The stories all borrow heavily from fairy tales. This was especially noticeable to me since I had read through The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales earlier this year. It really isn’t a retelling of any of those stories, but there were lots of little nods, sometimes with similarities and sometimes with twists, and with the tiniest hint of satire. Unlike many of the Grimm’s tales, however, this book was internally consistent, the characters’ actions made sense, and it never felt silly.I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you put so many words together in the same place, girl. If you’re not careful, they’ll get together and have babies, and then we’ll never shut you up.” Nighttime is the right time for young readers thanks to this perfect amalgamation of soothing text and image. Yeah, gardening and also just where we live, we’re surrounded by eleven acres. Well, we have eleven acres, and then we’re surrounded by an Audubon bird preserve that’s 1000 acres. So, there’s a lot of woods; there’s a lot of, a lot of the things in the book came from little, tiny experiences I’ve had, like seeing fox cubs playing in the stream or having a hood owl up in our apple tree looking down at me while I was gardening. So yes, ah, books tend to be pretty personal, really, when you pare it down. A striking sequence of collaged spreads. . . . All the senses are engaged as, en route to a cozy ‘sleep tight,’ Berger presents the smells, the sounds, and the sights of nighttime as elegant, dazzling, and serene.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The female characters of this book are a delightful bunch because of their sheer nonconformity- they are hideous witches who delight in disgust, mutant princesses-turned-pirate, stars, snake priestesses and more. They are rejects and outcasts, heritcs and monsters-unwanted and unruly women who have been owned and abused, imprisoned, rejected and denounced by a world that detests them. They defy expectation by persevering, saving each other and even banding together: I have never read a book like In the Night Garden before, and I expect that I will not read another book like it until I read its sequel. I have seen it described as an arabesque in book form, and I think that is exactly the right way to describe it. Its stories twist and twine, interrupt and intersect, and you never know when you will encounter a familiar character depicted in a fresh new light or a scrap of story that had been mentioned previously enhanced and complicated, breathed to new life. I had no idea how each section would come together but both of them did so beautifully and amazingly in ways that I would never have imagined. Because sometimes, if you’re out in nature, if you are being loud and busy, you’re not going to catch what nature is trying to show you. And so having this quiet cat sort of gracefully move through the night, obviously a picture book, the only sounds you’re going to hear are the sounds in your head or the sounds of the grown-up reading it to you. And I think because she is a quiet narrator, we get to actually take in and have the sensory experience of what your artwork is showing us and what your words are telling us. I love that you said that.

A girl lives abandoned in a sultan's garden, and her eyes are covered with stories. When a boy ventures into the garden, he discovers the girl and the incredible magic of the stories she possesses; her tales introduce him to a world of beasts and monstrosities, stars and witches, princes and princesses, each with their own history of adventure, suffering, love and loss.