Big Red Barn

Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown was the first "word" book that my daughter loved. A gift from a lawyer along with Owl Babies and Guess How Much I Love You, it is in a different class of board books because of the soothing rhyme and charming illustrations. It's easy to memorize so when babies start flipping pages, you can keep up without needing to look at the page. But first, an aside re Margaret Wise Brown - she's famous for basically inventing the baby board book milieu apart from her many interesting relationships (also reading In the Great Green Room by Amy Gary) - Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny, a pair of classics illustrated by Clement Hurd have prime locations in our bookshelf but unknowingly I have long loved a few stories of hers in an encyclopedia I had as a child and have brought intact to read to my daughter. I will write more about Bookshelf for Boys & Girls but it began a neat tradition as my mother bought me these before I was born. There are two stories in the first volume called "The Shy Little Horse" and "The Good Little Bad Little Pig" that I always loved and only recently realised were by her. Especially as I always wanted in pets and children that peculiar quality of being "good little, bad little" rather than merely one-dimensional. Crucially Margaret Wise Brown examines the familiar with a childlike curiosity and freshness rather than drifting into the fantastic- engaging for children and renewing for adults reading out to them. 

With all due respect to Clement Hurd, we greatly prefer Felicia Bond's illustration. She also illustrated 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' that we have but haven't read as my daughter is rather destructive with books at the moment - chewing, drooling and crushing them. There is a line in Big Red Barn that describes a fieldmouse being born in a field of corn. 

She gazed at this page for simply ages and learned to flip pages simply to reach it. The oversized butterfly, the tiny mouse and the vantage point of a field are all arresting details and elevate Brown's gentle rhymes.

We have however read Big Red Barn as a daytime book rather than as a bedtime book even though it drifts towards the animals sleeping at night - skimming over the dark pages except to rest a bit at the moon sailing high on the dark night sky. I don't know why this book has held so much appeal for us but even before she could respond to her own name the only way to urge my early crawler to come back was to open Big Red Barn and read aloud - a trick discovered by my mother and enjoyed by all. I wonder if she was drawn to this as a city baby, sleeping peacefully with all sirens and well-groomed dogs, and looking at a farm as a fantasy world. It was a treat to take her to a real farm with a red barn and so very many little pigs learning to squeal at Frying Pan Park in Virginia.