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. 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."" With subtlety, grace, and perfection, Berger creates a goodnight book for the ages. I like it better for a modern audience than Goodnight Moon.”— Anita Silvey, former Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book Yes. Well, I know that you have a great love for gardening, and you just talked about how you enjoy foraging for mushrooms. So, I have to imagine that the gardening part was a massive part of the inspiration for this book. And is that a fair assumption? Written by a child sleep expert, The In the Night Garden Bedtime Book is designed to help your little one fall asleep. The soft, lullaby-like language of the story will relax your child, and as each of the Night Garden friends falls asleep, your child will feel encouraged to do the same.

In 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.In this episode of The Growing Readers Podcast, listeners will have the chance to learn about award-winning author-illustrator Carin Berger, her love for books, childhood memories, and the inspiration behind her latest book, In The Night Garden. 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. 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. Highly recommended for the reader who appreciates beautiful prose, is willing to take notes, and is looking for something original.

All of the stories herein begin with this one: an abandoned girl in a garden whose skin has magically been inscribed with minutely tattooed stories. Faced with her first and only potential audience, she is compelled to tell her stories, for "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." Each story opens within the one before it like Russian nesting dolls. But then, several stories deep, a character from an earlier story reappears in a different narrator's story in a very different light; an action taken many stories ago is seen to have consequences that ripple out to touch other stories, other lives. There's little moral judgment: even a villain is allowed to be the hero of his own story. 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!And then I am hoping that on a deeper level, my daughter was a little bit afraid at night and not so good at falling asleep, um, particularly in new places. So, when we got our house, we would lie outside—the sounds were different than the city sounds, and we would lie out on the porch at night and kind of look at the stars and identify the sounds. So, the book, on a deeper level, I’m hoping, um, touches on being open and curious and unafraid about things we don’t know, or people that we don’t know, or cultures or the unknown. And so that’s, maybe most people won’t go there, but I’m hoping that some people will use that as an opportunity for conversation about that. I haven't read any fantasy quite like Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales duology. This is the story of a young orphan girl who is shunned because of the dark smudges that appeared on her eyelids when she was a baby. She lives alone in a sultan's garden because people think she's a demon and nobody will claim her. However, one of the young sons of the sultan, a curious fellow, finds her in the garden and asks her about her dark eyes. She explains that there are wonderful stories written on her eyelids and that a spirit has told her she must read and tell the stories; Then the spirit will return and judge her. The prince loves stories, he begs her to tell him one, and so she begins.

This is much the kind of book I would expect to be written by someone who changed her name to 'Catherynne', with that spelling—it's all fantastical creatures and quests and magic. It is a much more intelligent book than I expected, with stories nested within stories, and gender tropes are inverted (there are no damsels in distress here) to my great satisfaction. The maiden is the monster is the pirate; women can grow up to be fierce warriors. Nighttime is the right time for young readers thanks to this perfect amalgamation of soothing text and image.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: There are a variety of baby and toddler books in the Night Garden series to enjoy including: Ooh, Pretty Flower!, The Bouncy Jumping Game, Igglepiggle Counts and Time to Wash Faces. Read more Details I have loved or really enjoyed all of Valente's books that I've read. I'm a big fan. And while I quite enjoyed In the Night Garden quite a lot, there were moments when it feels like she was almost losing those strands of story, that they weren't being woven together quite enough and started to feel a bit snarled instead of simply messy. The real strength of the novel for me is in the beautiful language. Valente is a stylist, a perfectionist who believes a tale can and should be beautiful.