We got into the pigeon books way too late. My daughter was maybe already about four by the time we first picked one up, probably from the library, and it was an immediate hit around the household. And honestly, that's what I'm here for. There's nothing better than picking out a brand new children's book, realizing how amazing it is, and then getting the massive bonus points when you realize there are actually a lot of them. And not only are there a lot of them, there are a lot of different styles of books by that same author, so now let me go look at all of those as well. Before you know it, you have doubled the size of your bookshelf. That was totally our experience after the very first pigeon book, which I believe was The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! They're all really great books.
The formula starts with the pigeon
Reference Moth was found! Substitute Spider is relieved, although a bit sad that he's not going to make an appearance in this review.
There's a formula I've uncovered for why these books are so good, and it starts with the pigeon. The pigeon is just the most kid friendly, kid engaging type of book character you can make. He's the type of character that when you read the book, the kids want to interact with him. They want to talk to the pigeon. They want to be his parent or his big brother or sister and tell him no. Willems has built a character that is both lovable and a little bit naughty, I'd say even a little cagey (maybe that goes alongside naughty, I guess), and there's always something he's trying to get out of one of these books. In the original, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (which we actually don't own, by the way, we've only read it via the library), the pigeon wants something and he's going to pull out all the stops to try to get it.
Here, the something is staying up late. The bus driver needs to brush his teeth and asks us for a favor: don't let the pigeon stay up late.
Every excuse is a kid excuse
All these books give us some moral lesson that's very, very simplistic, not over the top, and it's not something where the point gets drilled into the kid at the end. They almost exist for the kid's own self-discovery of the moral, which here is that every kid doesn't want to go to sleep, and bedtime is an issue with pretty much every single kid in the world. Here they get to see it flipped around: there's this pigeon who doesn't want to go to sleep, and he's coming up with all these different excuses for why not, and all of them are exactly the same things that a kid would say.
At first you get "I'm in the mood for a hot dog party," which is him trying to change the subject and get your mind onto something else. When that doesn't work, he brings up that there's an educational TV show about birds on tonight, so he's pulling on your desire to have kids learn things, and that is exactly something my daughter would totally do.
The Pigeon has such good range. Those doe eyes he's giving us... I can almost feel it working on me.
Then we get the bargaining aspect, just five more minutes, and what is five minutes in the grand scheme of things, really? Then "you know, we never get to talk anymore, tell me about your day," which is a connection thing. Every parent is desperate to get information about how their kid's day went, and now he's offering it up on a silver platter, but it's going to come with the price of not going to bed on time. Counting the stars. And then we get one of my favorite things built into the formula, the panel page, where the pigeon is doing all of these different things at once. It's the desperation phase, all the last possible things he can think of to stay up: glass of water, studies show pigeons hardly need any sleep at all, it's the middle of the day in China, I'll go to bed early tomorrow night instead. Then the begging, please. Then my bunny wants to stay up too, and you can't say no to a bunny, can you? And then the giant yawn right afterwards, which he denies: that was not a yawn. He was stretching. He's 110% awake. It's all downhill from there, and before you know it he's asleep and we're told we did a good job.
Reading the panel page in these books is such a treat.
Talking back to the book
During the course of reading this, my kids are constantly talking to the book, saying, "No, no, no, you can't do that. You need to go to bed." It makes the kid engagement aspect of these books completely over the top. The kids will zoom into bed and they can't wait to give that pigeon a talking to about what he should or should not be doing. Big credit to Mo Willems on that. It's very clearly a book designed around kids; there's something he's doing that he knows kids are going to relate to and engage with that a lot of other books just don't quite get right. Every time I pull this off the shelf, I think that outside of some of those OG flip-the-page books (which the kids want to open so desperately that almost all the ones we own are ripped now), this is the highest talking-engagement book we have.
The writing itself is very simple. There are no rhymes, there aren't a lot of words on the page, and it's almost exclusively just a monologue from the pigeon to us trying to convince us to do something. For a lot of books this formula wouldn't work. You need a charismatic, interesting character to pull it off, and we have that with the pigeon.
The pigeon voice took a while
I'll be honest, this is one of the voices that came naturally but was hardest for me to reenact each time, because the pigeon is so animated. He says so many different things, so many different ways, and it's hard to get that voice just right. What I wound up with is a little bit nasally, a little whiny, but also trying to hide the whine in a way, and very sure of itself, like he's really trying to sell us something. Now my kids know the second I pull out that voice, a pigeon book is coming. And of course you can't do this voice without doing a little bit of the bus driver, or my personal favorite, Ducky. When we get to a review of the Ducky books, I'll tell you more. This is a big part of the dad survivability score for me: you can't do these books over and over and over without giving the pigeon a particular type of voice.
You can bet your bottom dollar that I perform the crap out of this yawn when reading the book.
Fifty pictures of the same pigeon, none the same
The illustrations add to all of this completely, and they're done by Mo Willems too, which I think is really great, because then there's this symmetry between the words he wants to write and how he has the pigeon look. There's nothing fancy going on: little word bubbles of what everybody's saying, and then just the pigeon on his own with his simple facial expressions and his body language. Every single time he says something, his body perfectly matches exactly what you would expect him to look like for what he's saying. You wouldn't think that such a simple drawing (I'm pretty sure I could draw the pigeon pretty well, at least a basic view of him) could say so much about how the pigeon is feeling, but it does. He's cute, and any kid just wants to look at what he's doing next, in particular when he's exasperated: feathers flying off of him, screaming at us, his eyes almost the size of his head, his mouth as open as it can go. I can almost flip through this book just looking at each image of the pigeon and realizing that none of them are the same somehow, despite there being probably 50 independent pictures of him. And then we get the pages where it's just a big yawn written in really big letters.
Exasperated Pigeon is my favorite Pigeon.
Where it lands for us
This is a five out of five on everything and a clear dad's pick. It's not Goodnight Moon or The Very Hungry Caterpillar in terms of being that well known, but it's now in that tier. I was probably one of the latest to the game on these books, and now you won't come across a parent that hasn't read or recommended the pigeon books, in the same way you won't come across a parent who doesn't recommend Bluey. It's newer, but it's permeated current parent life, and the pigeon now takes up a very substantial amount of space on our bookshelf alongside the Elephant and Piggie books and the other Mo Willems books. These are books I'm going to keep forever. I hope my kids read them to their grandkids, and then those grandkids read them to my great grandkids, et cetera, et cetera. They're that good.
I don't pull this one out for the lesson. I pull it out because it's exactly what I want out of most kids' books: it's just fun. It's enjoyable to read it with them. I love hearing my kids talk to the pigeon and laugh at his antics. I love being able to do the voice and the whole performance aspect of reading these books. We all love looking at the pictures, and we can't wait to go to the library to pick up the next pigeon book to figure out what silly things he's up to next.
