I love when writers use page turns to create guessing games. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by Eric Carle is perhaps the most iconic example of this. But lesser-known The Cat at Night by Dahlov Ipcar (published just two years after Brown Bear) holds a special place in my heart.
Here’s the narrative frame: A farmer winds his clock, puts his cat on the porch, and goes to bed. What does the cat do next? This question sets off a series of questions, each of which lets us follow the cat deeper into the night, through the farm, along the highway, and into town.
The journey should be mundane, but Ipcar renders it thrilling with a visual game: she shows us each nighttime scene first as we would see it—dark, indeterminate—and then as the cat sees it: bright, colorful, detailed.
The Cat at Night, written and illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar
The cat can see clear as day. What do you think he sees? For The Cat at Night, questions like this become the bridge between fields of silhouettes and fields throbbing with peachy moth wings. They guide the reader from mysterious spread to vibrant spread, creating the pause to guess before we see the pink rat tails curling under the feed boxes, the big white horse asleep while standing. (That is the way horses usually sleep, Ipcar instructs us.)
There is plenty to see in the shadows, too. Ipcar’s painting is unmistakably modern. Many spreads from The Cat at Night would fit nicely next to Matisse’s La Gerbe or Blue Nude II. The visual language is both an ode to Ipcar’s Maine farm and a celebration of simple shapes and bright colors. But most importantly, it’s a lot of fun.
The Cat at Night, written and illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar
Hark, fellow nocturnal!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no farmer in children’s literature should sleep soundly through the night. Your cows unionize. Your cow flies away. Your home, burgled. Your life, bungled.
The farmer in The Cow in the Dark at Night by Glowworm favorite Jess Hannigan is not exempt from this rule. Though inspired by The Cat at Night, Hannigan’s book is not a guessing game. It’s a different kind of genre crossover.
The Cow in the Dark at Night, written and illustrated by Jess Hannigan
It is nighttime, and our narrator—whose pluckiness is at odds with her naivety—is loose. Her adventure leads her to more and more foreboding creatures (skunks, burglars, vampires, and . . . martians?). In this way, Hannigan’s book reads more like a great comedy sketch for littles. Hannigan pushes her comedic concept to the absolute edge before bringing us back to earth to pay off a joke from the first act.
The cat from the original even makes a delightful cameo as the deadpan foil to the screwball cow.
The Cow in the Dark at Night, written and illustrated by Jess Hannigan
Beyond their thematic parity, I like reading The Cat at Night and The Cow in the Dark at Night as a double-header for two reasons:
Ipcar’s paintings and Hannigan’s collages give us different visual languages for night—both of which use organic forms and repetition in interesting ways.
Cat and Cow showcase two very different approaches to voice in children’s lit, between the grounded authority of Ipcar’s questions and the emboldened chattiness of Hannigan’s cow.
Reading these books back-to-back is a good reminder of the rhetorical mechanisms, both visual or linguistic, that—when done well—bring us closer to the page and immerse us deeper into a story. I would gladly follow that cat deeper into the night. Would gladly follow that silly cow deeper into the solar system.
Until next week,
Tyler