Goodnight Moon has sold more than 48 million copies since it was first published in 1947. But one reader is questioning author Margaret Wise Brown’s design choices.
“This bedroom is enormous,” comedian Raquel D’Apice began in a hilarious post on her blog, The Ugly Volvo. “There is no one, I think, who has not noticed this. As someone who has lived in apartments only slightly larger than a ‘little toy house,’ it’s mildly vexing that this bedroom is the size of a banquet hall in Downton Abbey.”
The New Jersey-based mom of Ben, 4, and Sam, 9 months, went on to reimagine a conversation had by the interior decorators. “‘Do you think a tiger skin rug would be overkill?’” asks one designer to which the other replies: “‘’For a young child’s room? No. Not at all.’”
D’Apice, 37, also took issue with “the dangerously non-childproofed fire place,” “the world’s smallest and most useless clothesline”(which holds just two socks and two mittens) and the bookshelf. “Unless this rabbit is defending a doctoral thesis, there’s no need for him to own every non-fiction hardcover from Farrar Straus and Giroux,” she wrote. She then went on to call out the proximity of the comb, brush and bowl full of mush: “Almost as appealing as a nail clipper next to a plate of sunny-side up eggs.”
“I’ve read the book so many times that reading it was like commuting to a job you’ve been driving to for 10 years. You don’t have to pay attention to the words anymore, you just know them, so I started overanalyzing the pictures,” D’Apice tells Us Weekly. I was like, ‘Hey, if this rabbit’s young enough to have an old woman rocking him to sleep, why does he have a black office telephone on his night table? I don’t know any nursery where the parents are like, ‘You know what? My 3-year-old needs a landline.”
D’Apice, who also took on Go, Dog, Go and Harold and the Purple Crayon, only pokes fun at the books she likes. “The books I don’t like, I hide under the sofa so my son can’t find them,” the Welcome to the Club: 100 Parenting Milestones You Never Saw Coming author tells Us. “And I apologize, because it sounds cruel to hide books from a little kid, but usually they are super long books that I cannot read every night because in addition to losing my mind, I would also lose my voice.”
