We are living through an extended golden age for children’s books, a product of America’s astonishing prosperity—and growing child-centeredness—in the long postwar era. Think of the roster of brand-name authors, from Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak and Beverly Cleary to Eric Carle, Judy Blume, Jacqueline Woodson and on and on. Or visit the section for new picture books at your local library or bookstore, where an ever-lengthening shelf of tomorrow’s classics brings together ingenious storytelling and dazzling art.

That creativity has been rewarded. For more than a decade, growth in children’s book sales has substantially outpaced the rest of the publishing industry. Parents are buying the books to entertain and edify their offspring, of course, but the vitality of the children’s book market has another cause that parents aren’t always ready to acknowledge: We love the books too, and in the best of them, find many of the same satisfactions that we find in adult literature. The stories may be simpler, but that doesn’t make them simple-minded. We all know adults who read and reread the Harry Potter series, but many older classics, even books for the very young, offer similar rewards, as parents who read them aloud at bedtime have happily discovered for generations.

A case in point is the totemic night-night book of modern American babyhood, “Goodnight Moon,” written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. Published in 1947 to perfectly nice reviews and perfectly modest sales, its popularity has swelled over the decades to the point that Americans now buy more than a half-million copies a year.

Like many parents, my wife and I were given multiple editions of “Goodnight Moon” as baby gifts when our daughter, Zoë, was born. I remember reading it to her and, eventually, her younger brother, Isaac, and being impressed not only by its rhythmic charm in lulling a child to sleep but also by the fact that “Goodnight Moon,” in essence, is a book about babyhood.

The story, such as it is, goes like this: A little bunny is being put to bed by “a quiet old lady whispering ‘hush.’” The contents of the bunny’s bedroom are cataloged and then bade good night: “Goodnight kittens / And goodnight mittens / Goodnight clocks / And goodnight socks,” and so on. At first glance, this might seem rote. But the secret to “Goodnight Moon” is that it sees everything with fresh eyes, even clocks and socks. “The first great wonder at the world is big in me,” Brown once said, trying to explain her gift for writing for children.


That wonder is present in the book’s very first words:

In the great green room

There was a telephone

And a red balloon


And a picture of—

[here we turn the page]

The cow jumping over the moon.

An illustration from ‘Goodnight Moon.’ Photo: Courtesy of HarperCollins Children’s Books

A less interesting, less intuitive book might have started out with something like, “There once was a little bunny who was going to bed in his little bunny bedroom.” Brown instantly and gracefully gives us a child’s eye view of things. The great green room: to a 2-year-old, a bedroom—or any room—is an epic space, a Monument Valley full of objects that glow with strange newness. Nothing in their world has yet acquired the dull patina of familiarity that allows adults to go about their business oblivious to, say, the miracle of grass or sky.


That empathy is what gives the book its hold on toddlers, but it is also key to what “Goodnight Moon” offers adults: a window into the minds of those baffling creatures. As child-development specialists tell us, infants spend their first year figuring out where they end and everything else in the world begins, so even Brown’s cataloging of the contents of the great green room has meaning. For toddlers, the very idea of things is powerful, and we all know how they feel about those things they consider their own.

But who is this quiet old lady whispering hush, who materializes halfway through the book after we’ve already been introduced to her empty rocking chair? A nanny? The bunny’s grandmother? A random caregiver dragged in off the street? Brown doesn’t say; it is just the kind of odd, open-ended detail that gives “Goodnight Moon” traction with kids’ imaginations. After all, what is life for them but being continually thrown into new circumstances that they don’t fully comprehend? There might be a teasing little wink in there, too, between Brown and her young audience, an implicit dismissal of adults as old people always whispering hush.

Publishers know where purchasing power lies, so grown-ups generally make a good showing in books for the very young (fairy tales aside). But I have a special affection for the mother and father in the seven books by Russell Hoban starring an imaginative school-age badger named Frances. In her 1960 debut, “Bedtime for Frances,” illustrated by Garth Williams, the young mammal contrives as many ways as she can to avoid going to sleep. She asks for a piggyback ride to bed. She asks for her doll. She asks for her teddy bear. She asks for kisses. She asks for another round of kisses. She ups the ante, claiming to see a tiger in her bedroom, then a giant. Her skills of manipulation are formidable.

“ I realize that they are make-believe talking badgers, but I admire them. ”

Many parents would have blown their stack by this point, but Frances’s parents remain preternaturally patient, loving yet firm. I realize that they are make-believe talking badgers, but I admire them. They are less helicopter parents than tugboat parents, giving their daughter room to express her anxieties before nudging her back where they want her:


“There is a tiger in my room,” said Frances.

“Did he bite you?” said Father.

“No,” said Frances.

“Did he scratch you?” said Mother.

“No,” said Frances.

“Then he is a friendly tiger,” said Father.

“He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.”

“Do I have to?” said Frances.

“Yes,” said Father.

“Yes,” said Mother.

My children loved Frances. I think they saw in her a gently satirical version of themselves. I loved the books, too, when I was a kid, but I am even fonder of them now that I view them as witty, de facto parenting guides.

My relationship with C.S. Lewis’s fantasy novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (1950) has also deepened over time—and far more dramatically than with Frances. I was first exposed to the book in the second grade when our teacher, Mrs. Anastasia, read it aloud to us, a chapter a day, during our post-lunch quiet time. I remember listening rapt as she recounted the story of the four Pevensie children, shuttled away from London during the Blitz to a big house in the country.

There, thanks to a magical wardrobe, they are transported to the even more magical land of Narnia, where animals talk and mythical creatures like satyrs and centaurs roam. The only downside: Narnia is ruled by an evil White Witch who has a thing for turning her enemies into stone. The four children—Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter—enlist in the fight to overturn the Witch’s rule, led by a heroic, supernatural lion named Aslan. When Edmund betrays his siblings and falls into the Witch’s clutches, his life can be spared only by Aslan’s sacrifice—cruelly murdered in Edmund’s place, his throat slit.

It was dark stuff for kids. But wait! The lion miraculously returns to life and vanquishes his enemies. Hearty British huzzahs all around! This was thrilling in second grade, likely the first time that my classmates and I were exposed to the resurrection of a beloved storybook character who had been put to death.

“Resurrection” is the key word, of course. When he wasn’t writing for children or teaching literature at Oxford and Cambridge, C.S. Lewis was a well-known author of Christian apologias. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the other six books in the Narnia series aren’t allegories per se. They are too personal and idiosyncratic, too enthralled by storytelling for its own sake, but they are certainly steeped in Christian thought and faith.

Not being a believer myself, I realized all of this to my dismay a decade later, when I reread “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” for a class in high school. What had been rich and thrilling to me as a kid was now revealed, in the unforgiving glare of teenage enlightenment, as religious propaganda, a kind of Christian stalking horse. I felt betrayed.

So imagine my surprise when I picked up the book yet again when my children were old enough and found myself now charmed and persuaded by Lewis’s religiosity—not by the underlying theology, but by his ability to convey in vivid, organic terms what Christianity meant to him, how it felt. His Aslan is a worthy stand-in for Christ, and when first describing the lion, Lewis makes clear that what is most important is Aslan’s effect on the children: “People who have never been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes, and they found they couldn’t look at him and went all trembly.”

That contrast between “good” and “terrible,” the depiction of a physical presence so “solemn” and “overwhelming” the children have to look away, is echoed by a lovely phrase later in the book, after Aslan, returned to life, leads Lucy and Susan on a celebratory game of chase: “[W]hether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind.” I’m no expert on religious art, but if there is a more evocative and poetic description of what it might feel like to be in the presence of a being both divine and of this world, a being who commands both love and awe, I would like to know it.

Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. Photo: Alamy

If I hadn’t expected to be moved by rereading “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” I really hadn’t expected to be turned into an emotional puddle by Winnie-the-Pooh. When Zoë and Isaac were quite young, they had been enthralled by a series of flimsy, uninspired books based on the Disney Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons, which had somehow made it into the nursery library. I decided that the kids should be exposed to the real thing and forced them to listen to the A.A. Milne originals, which date to the 1920s.

Though I vaguely knew “The House at Pooh Corner” from my own childhood, I was completely unprepared for this curveball in the final chapter: “Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed nobody knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow everyone in the Forest felt it was happening at last.”

Milne never explains precisely what is going on here, but that “at last” has a razor’s edge. I take this all to mean that Christopher Robin is being shipped off to boarding school, or some heartless governess has told him he is getting too old to be talking to stuffed animals, or he is just growing up. Whatever the reason, the crux of the chapter is that Christopher Robin has to break the bad news to Pooh. They go off on a walk through the Hundred Acre Wood, discussing the special joys of doing “Nothing.” You begin to get the feeling Christopher Robin is stalling for time. Finally he blurts:

“I’m not going to do Nothing anymore.”

“Never again?” [Pooh asks.]

“Well not so much. They don’t let you.”

Pooh, the bear of little brain, doesn’t quite understand that Christopher Robin is, well, breaking up with him. And poor Christopher Robin, like so many males in this position, can’t quite get the words out, stammering as if he were a Hugh Grant character. It’s a wrenching scene, and Pooh’s uncomprehending innocence makes it feel almost cruel:

“Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I—if I’m not quite—” he stopped and tried again—“Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?”

“Understand what?”

As I read this aloud, I couldn’t help weeping. It’s a story about leaving childhood behind, which for poor baffled Pooh, the one being left—the one who exists only in Christopher Robin’s imagination—is a kind of death. I was naturally thinking about my own kids growing up, which for a parent is another kind of death, or an intimation of one’s own.

When I picked up “The House at Pooh Corner,” I hardly expected to find myself emotionally wrenched—waxing philosophical, savoring the sight of my kids in their beds—as I closed the book. The punch line, of course, is that Zoë and Isaac were unmoved—they still preferred the Disney knockoffs. But they had to submit occasionally to my affection for the original Pooh. I was reading to my children, but as we all recognized at some point, the books weren’t just for them.

Mr. Handy is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult,” which will be published by Simon & Schuster on Aug. 15.