What We're Reading: Tracy

Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, a biography by Leonard S. Marcus.

May 23 marks the one hundredth birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, the legendary creator of such classic children's works as Goodnight Moon and the Noisy books. Her deceptively simple stories featured remarkable rhythm and lyricism, along with a dream-like quality that remains difficult to describe.
Brown's personal life, in contrast to her seemingly simple, happy books, was quite complicated and marked by sorrows. With her death at the relatively young age of 42, children lost a vocal defender and empathetic friend, one who frequently argued that "in this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been -- it may even be greater --for quietness is an essential part of all awareness."
Take a Brown book home tonight, read it in a quiet moment, then drift to sleep to "goodnight noises everywhere."