Margaret Wise Brown

Something unsettling resides at the heart of the most beloved books for very young children—that is, the literature for illiterates. This note is a belated attempt to grapple with the horror of infinite regression as it manifests in certain of these works, and perhaps to sound the alarm for parent-caretaker voice-over providers who are too sleep-deprived to notice what’s actually going on.

In Margaret Wise Brown’s Little Fur Family, a small, hirsute child of indeterminate species spends a day in the woods. This gentle narrative of forest exploration appears completely anodyne.

Goodnight Moon is a hugely popular children’s picture-book by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Clarke Moore; it was recently made ‘interactive’ for the iPad. I’ve recently been having some weekly iPad time with our youngest kindergarten class, and thought they would be the perfect guinea pigs for this intriguing app. So … how did it [...]

More Blogs