The best children’s stories, whether they take the form of books, television shows, movies, or something else, are also loved by adults. They are not just tolerated or long-suffered but truly loved, and beyond the vicarious joy we might feel while reading them in the presence of children. Some stories accomplish this by aiming for adults and merely wearing children’s clothing, so to speak. “The Simpsons,” for instance, with its jovial, animated exterior barely obscures a deeper layer of social satire and allusion. The same goes for the Muppets; likewise “The Little Prince” or “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
Then there’s Sandra Boynton, a name that many parents of kids born since the late seventies will know well. Boynton has published dozens of books that have sold millions of copies, all featuring her hand-drawn animal characters—hippos and cows and chickens and dogs and mice, creatures that she first created for a massively successful line of greeting cards. “A to Z,” “Barnyard Dance,” “The Going to Bed Book,” “Moo Baa La La La”—they are titles whose very mention will draw out tender, fragile memories from kids and parents everywhere. These books are written so simply, for children so young—“A cow says moo. A sheep says baa”—that it’s hard to imagine that they could have hidden depths. But I have begun to realize, perhaps belatedly, that they do.
It was a book that Boynton wrote for adults that helped me recognize her shrewdness. The most successful of her several books for grownups was the 1982 bestseller “Chocolate: The Consuming Passion,” which was just rereleased in a revised and updated edition by Workman Publishing. “Chocolate” helped facilitate the rise of Boynton’s children’s empire, its success leading Workman to print some of her most popular board books. (It features the now familiar cats and pigs and rabbits and hippos—especially hippos.)
The book defies genre, but on first blush one might be tempted to call it an illustrated natural, culinary, and industrial history of chocolate. What is striking about “Chocolate,” though, is the way its seemingly unvarnished earnestness is coated in a generous robe of sardonic tastemaking. “Anyone who claims that the absence of cocoa disqualifies white chocolate as chocolate is quibbling,” Boynton writes. Chocolate connoisseurs everywhere gasp, presumably. Then: “The same purist would probably argue that water and fructose is not ‘real’ wine.” On the following page, there is an invitation to deploy sight, smell, and taste to appreciate white chocolate, along with three boxes sketched around an empty blank page. “Cut and chew” the last one dryly instructs. “If you are eager to learn more about carob,” Boynton’s one-page ode to the supposed chocolate substitute reads, “I really don’t know what to tell you.”
Fans of Boynton’s board books might be taken aback by the sneering tone. This is, after all, the same author who brought us “Are You a Cow?,” in which a chicken cops to his poultriform shape as a preface to a series of inquiries directed at the reader: Are you a cow? Dog? Duck? Frog? He finally concludes that “you must be you!,” an affirmation likely accompanied by a playful prod at the tiny nose of your precious, singular baby.
But there are similar surprises in what seem to be Boynton’s more innocent works. Take “The Going to Bed Book”: what appears to be an innocuous precursor to the activity that its reading facilitates turns out, on closer inspection, to be rather strange. On a boat far out at sea, the usual Boyntonian menagerie—lion and pig and rhino and hippo and elephant and more—heads below “to take a bath in one big tub / with soap all over—scrub scrub scrub.” After donning pajamas and brushing their teeth, the animals pursue an unusual bedtime ritual: “And when the moon is on the rise, they all go up to exercise.” They work out! On deck! Right before bed!
No manner of earthly logic explains the post-bath and toothbrush exercise ritual. Parents who notice it might appreciate the opportunity for a head scratch during the fevered tedium of bedtime. (Oh, that Boynton, she’s a stinker.) But other interpretations are possible, readings that afford Boynton’s work the same layered meaning that, say, “The Simpsons” provokes, but in the far more formally challenging genre of the board book.
Here’s mine: the boat isn’t just any boat. It bears the unmistakable silhouette of Noah’s ark, host to the animals saved from the flood in Genesis. These animals are frozen in time, locked into the forty days and forty nights of Old Testament God’s vengeance. What does this have to do with exercising after bathing and tooth-brushing? Well, Noah knew the duration of the flood thanks to the Lord’s warning, but the animals had no idea. Imagine the terror of repetition without relief among the flood-bound Boynton hippos. This is also the terror of new parenting: the sameness of every day—the same rituals, the same books, the same diapers and tears and wails and suckles, joy and pride all bound up with the dread and exhaustion of infancy.
In the face of such mania, the animals of “The Going to Bed Book” adopt any variation possible—this time, exercising after their bath. It’s monstrous, but the relief is palpable: “And when the moon is on the rise, they all go up to exercise.” It sounds like a habitual act, but it’s actually an exceptional one. This selfsame day is made special by a tiny, bizarre adjustment, which offers comfort for rhino and bear and bunny. The spent reader might do well to heed this sage advice.
Then there’s “But Not the Hippopotamus,” Boynton’s board-book masterpiece. In the book, a hippo opts out of a series of activities partaken by her compatriots, each time invoking the titular refrain. A hog and a frog cavort in the bog, for example, and a moose and a goose together have juice… but not the hippopotamus. At the end of the book, the animal pack encourages the fair hippo to “come join the lot of us.” A moment of pregnant anguish ensues, but she agrees: but yes the hippopotamus—only to reveal in a twist on the final board, “But not the armadillo.”
“But Not the Hippopotamus” invites two obvious interpretations. First, that the hippopotamus is bashful, unsure how to insert herself into the delights of her peers. Finally, they notice and invite her in—a model for humans and armadillos alike. Second, that the other animals are deliberately excluding the hippopotamus, perhaps even just for being a hippopotamus. When read this way, the final invitation to “come join the lot of us” is bittersweet—are the moose and bear and cat and rats just leading her on? Is the armadillo wise to steer clear of these savages?
Thanks to a board book’s simple and spare language, ambiguity reigns, releasing other, equally plausible meanings. The careful reader will note that many of the books’ pursuits have addictive properties—cavorting, shopping, drinking, exercise. Perhaps the hippopotamus is avoiding dependency, or is a recovering addict. (This, I should warn you, is, given the book’s ending, a depressing hermeneutic to indulge just before bedtime.)
Or perhaps the book is about cultural assimilation. The hippo, native to sub-Saharan Africa, cannot fathom the habits of North American creatures like bears and hares. Should a hippo be allowed to wallow, as she would do natively, or must she partake of the strange customs of her new environment? Boynton’s hippo finally relents. But the armadillo, native to Central and South America, resists.
It may seem preposterous to read so much into board books. But why? Art becomes great when its potential meanings multiply, breaking free of obvious uses and even creators’ intentions. On the millionth reading, great children’s books can still offer us something new. They become old friends bearing new secrets.
Sandra Boynton deserves mention alongside more frequently acclaimed masters of cross-generational entertainment, like Matt Groening and Jim Henson. Her board books are not mere trifles to be tolerated until finally—finally—they can be cast aside, but rich works that all of us can and should enjoy far longer than the tiny sands that slip between crawling and preschool can measure. If anything, the obvious cultural references that dot “The Simpsons” or “SpongeBob SquarePants” seem brazen and cumbersome by comparison.
