In the Night Garden: The Bedtime Book

Product Information

a b "Past Winners and Nominees – Children's – Awards – 2008". BAFTA. Archived from the original on 14 September 2012 . Retrieved 17 March 2010. On an evening, when I was a very small child, an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. A spirit came into my cradle on the seventh day of the seventh month of my life, and while my mother slept in her snow white bed, the spirit touched my face, and left there many tales and spells, like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs were so great in number and so closely written that they appeared as one long, unbroken streak of jet on my eyelids. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the wind. Together they make a great magic, and when the tales are all read out, and heard end to shining end, to the last syllable, the spirit will return and judge me."" It didn't take her millennia, and these tales are entirely her own creation, although the stories are so amazing it seems impossible they hatched from one imagination. Each chapter introduces a character, who then tells a story introducing a character, who then tells a story introducing a character, who then tells a story introducing a character, who then tells a story introducing a character...and so on. Each chapter is short. It took millennia for the stories to be collected that eventually became the fairy tales we know: Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Eddas, One Thousand and One Nights. The unknown authors of these famous stories have been many, passing down oral tales for generations. We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident, nothing more than puddles who stood up and gave each other names...

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: In The Night Garden". Golden Bear Toys. Archived from the original on 3 February 2022 . Retrieved 3 February 2022.Here at last is something truly rich and strange - a rarefied dish to cleanse even the most jaded palate. In the Night Garden is a virtuoso feat of storytelling somewhere between Italo Calvino and Arabian Nights that has me wondering over its slyly subversive stories days after I finished. A gentle, collage-illustrated bedtime read about the often mysterious and always beautiful experiences to be found in nighttime spaces. 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. Lane, Harriet (25 November 2007). "Night fever: How In The Night Garden became a TV fairytale". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 30 August 2023.

I think since tiny-hood, I’ve always loved books. I’ve loved them as objects. I’ve loved them as just the form of a book. And even as a really little kid, we’d go to the library once a week, and we each were allowed to, I don’t know, get a little pile of books. So, I’ve always been a reader. I don’t think I’ve always actively thought of I may not even still think of myself as a writer. I don’t think I would introduce myself as a writer. And that’s just because even though I’ve always written, that’s not my training. My training is in design and in art. BBC – CBeebies Grownups – In the Night Garden". BBC. Archived from the original on 24 July 2010 . Retrieved 17 May 2010. a b "Past Winners and Nominees – Children's – Awards – 2009". BAFTA. Archived from the original on 26 February 2010 . Retrieved 17 March 2010. Dinos that love to move and groove get children counting from one to 10—and perhaps moving to the beat.By turns the other stories are ethereal, rich, strange, bloody, sad and haunting. The underlying factor is their unceasing creativity, in that they offer twists to tired tropes, illuminate new voices and feature a dizzying variety of amazing beings. It also helps that Valente's prose is powerful, leaving me stunned on a few occasions. Here is a favorite:

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 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. In tandem, the text and art endow nighttime with a sense of whimsy and wonder, and for little ones readying for bed, they’ll find comfort and reassurance for sweeter dreams.” —Booklist, Starred Review

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.