Books like Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar were the initial inspiration for getting so interested in children's books. What makes them special? What separates the really great ones from the ones that you don't want to read? Yesterday we reviewed Goodnight Moon, and I thought I'd follow that up with another similarly iconic book. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is another book where it's all put together perfectly. It's not just a great story. It's a book that encompasses really great writing with the perfect matching illustrations, and then makes it an experience beyond just the typical reading that brings something special to the book.
One hundred nights in a row, give or take
Reference Moth is looking extremely skeptical at that Caterpillar. It does not think it's of "the moth variety".
I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say my son requested this book about 100 nights in a row, probably around the age of between one and two. We read it so much that it didn't even go back on the bookshelf. It just permanently sat out next to his bed knowing that, oh, we're going to do that caterpillar book again. There's a reason why this blog's motto references how much I read this book. It's just that sticky in our household. It's a memorable book for kids. Is it something that they'll always say is their favorite book? I don't think so. It's not that type of book, but when it comes to pulling books off the shelf, it's the one that they're always grabbing.
And even now that my kids are older and we don't pull it off the shelf anymore, it still stays on the shelf. Maybe every once in a while I'll pull it off and see if I can get my kids to read it. Likely they won't complain. Even my older daughter, eight years old, can enjoy a book like this still.
Your kid will absolutely want to be the one to 1) say the fruit that the caterpillar is eating on that day and 2) turn the page.
Short pages, holes on purpose
You see this a lot with other children's books that are lift-the-flap: the idea that if you make a book interactive, kids will be more interested in it. They're not just a passive observer in the book, they actually get to do something themselves, and there are surprises. In a lot of cases it's designed to help with engagement, and sometimes it works okay. Other times it's tacked on in a way where the book publisher is just like, hey, we want to make a book that's really flashy on the shelves with really cool pop-outs, and it'll probably break within the first five reads.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a lot more intentional. Obviously it's not a lift-the-flap book. It's a little different than that with the pages, but it's very much intentionally designed for the story that's given in a way that just makes a lot of sense. The illustrations are great, but they're elevated to an entirely new level with the form of the book, with the short pages with the holes in them. It's just a very appealing visual for kids to look at. It's something special that other books don't really have. And it's not gimmicky. It fits with the style of the book.
The pages in particular that I'm talking about are when he starts looking for some food and then on each day he starts eating through a different fruit. The pages start really small on Monday, where it's just a single apple, but you get a little hole through it that the caterpillar is eating through. And when you flip that page, you actually see him crawling out of that hole he just nibbled. Each day the page gets a little longer because we add another fruit: two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges.
One of the most iconic illustrations in the history of children's books.
But he was still hungry
The writing itself is simple. It's not exactly Goodnight Moon in that every word is perfectly placed, and I don't think they're going for that level of minimalism or artisticness. It's not necessarily written in a rhythmic, poetic way that really draws somebody into wanting to read it all the time the way a Dr. Seuss would, for instance.
But it's fun. There's some nice repetition when you're going through it. You get to say "but he was still hungry, but he was still hungry, but he was still hungry." That night he had a stomach ache. You get the really long run-on sentence of all the things that he gets to eat that just keeps going and going and going, and you really get the sense of how much he's eating as he's going through this list of junk food. A kid's maybe not going to love a pickle, for instance, but pickles are fun to say, pickles are fun to look at, and it just adds a lot of character to the book.
That's one of the things that I've liked so much about read-alouds with the kids. It's a performance in a way. I want to make the experience enjoyable for them. I want to make it entertaining for me. And a big part of that isn't just reading the words on the page. It's doing the voices. It's hitting the cadence just right so that it becomes a little rhythmic, sing-songy. You leave them hanging as you're turning the page just with the right note. This book really hits that super well, and I find myself really appreciating how it's written.
If you've read children's books endlessly, you are familiar with the technique of reading every single bit of text on the page including the long copyright type statements. I've probably said "For my sister Christa" more times than Eric Carle has at this point.
I always LOL a bit in my head when I look at the caterpillar's facial expression here. I can only imagine this is what all caterpillars feel when they realize they are a butterfly now.
Your kid's first science book
When it comes to the story, Goodnight Moon is very thin. It's just a little story of a bunny going to sleep with his bedtime routine. Hungry Caterpillar is maybe coming with a little more. In a strange way, you can almost classify this as the first scientific book a kid will ever read. I don't know how accurate it is that caterpillars eat all of these various foods. In particular, I highly doubt that a caterpillar would chew through something like a pickle. Maybe I'm wrong on that. But it is about the transformation process of a caterpillar hatching from an egg, going through the process of eating and growing larger, then spinning a cocoon and hatching into a butterfly. That's what ties the whole story together, this evolution progression. It's not designed as a book to explain that process, but that's what we're leading up through throughout the book, and that's keeping things moving. And since this is almost a kid's first science book: at some point I swear they stopped calling them "cocoons." Modern books seem to prefer "pupa" or "chrysalis." I have no idea what's right. All I know is that I prefer butterflies in cocoons and Pluto as a planet. #BringBackThe90's
I think every kid now probably has a really great understanding of at least the basic metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies because of this book. I think it's maybe one of the reasons why my younger son loves bugs so much. After 100 reads of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, how could he not at this point?
Hundreds of reads, maybe thousands
We read it so much that not only did I get it memorized, I memorized the cadence. I memorized the way in which we would always flip the pages. I memorized my son's reaction as we went through the book. And it became this nightly ritual. As a dad who's read this now a countless number of times, like hundreds, maybe thousands, I don't know, each time is not more painful than the last. If anything, it becomes more enjoyable, especially once you memorize the words and you can really focus on the cadence of how you say them and really iron out a great presentation of the book.
This is absolutely a dad's pick, five out of five. I love the writing, the illustrations are great, and it's just really high kid engagement. This is a book, a lot like Goodnight Moon, that I would honestly like to own multiple copies of, just knowing that we're going to read it so much. They're going to get a lot of wear and tear and we'll have to have new fresh ones ready to go on the shelf. It's a book that I would highly recommend to anybody.
