MADreads

“On the African veld, there is a village. As the sun sets, parents tell their children, ‘It is time for bed.’” I Just Want to Say Good Night is a universal story of childhood. While Rachel Isadora’s beautiful oil paint illustrations transport children to a far away African landscape, all the cheeky little ways Lala employs to stay up just a little bit longer will feel wholly familiar. I can imagine my own three-year-old in central Wisconsin saying… “I just want to say goodnight to the little ants” or "Yes. Yes. I am coming.

Karen Brooks gives Chaucer's Wife of Bath a chance to tell her side of the story in this vivid and absorbing tale of how a woman could gain agency in her own life in a time when she legally had none.

Andy Warhol and Truman Capote planned to write a smash Broadway play together in 1978. The two friends recorded approximately 80 hours of their conversations as an artistic experiment. The project was never completed and the tapes were filed away and inaccessible to the public at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. After Andy Warhol's death in 1987, over 3,000 cassettes recorded on Andy's Sony Walkman were discovered. The tapes were undated and had little or no notations and had been recorded by somewhat stealthy means so were not "legal" to listen to until 2037 under New York law.

Sandra Boynton needs no introduction for anyone with a toddler in their life, and I was very excited for the newest addition to the collection, this one a hardcover picture book instead of the classic board book, but still filled with the signature silly animals and great rhymes. 

Not since Mo Willems' pigeon had to go to school ("The unknown stresses me out, dude") have I felt so seen and understood by an animal in a picture book, but this story spoke to me from the opening page: