Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site (Board Book for Toddlers, Children’s Board Book)

Evidence that anything can make it onto the NYT Bestsellers list. Don't you dare tell me we live in a meritocracy when there are thousands of children's books about trucks and yet this one is the one that has spawned an endless parade of spinoffs and merch.

This book falls squarely in one of my least-favorite genres of kid fiction: condescending books that talk at length about going to sleep, as if your kid is taking their bedtime cues from what the characters in the book are doing. For parents, it's tempting to buy into this fiction because you want so badly for it to be true, but deep down you know it's not. Your kid is somehow going to be more amped by the end of the book than when you started, and there's nothing you can do about it. The only entry I will accept in this field is Boynton's Going to Bed Book because it acknowledges that doing jumping jacks is, for some unknowable reason, a common part of going to bed.

A book with other redeeming qualities might be able to pull off the conceit of pandering about bedtime with trucks, but this one is a mess.

First, the trucks are all men? Really? Love that we're still writing, a quarter of the way into the twenty first century, like women are not part of the trades. The real-life construction crew digging up the gas main on my street has more gender diversity than this book.

Second, the continuity is a mess, or more accurately, non-existent. It's day! It's night! It's day again! We're asleep under the moon. No wait, the sun is just now setting! Are we traveling through time to re-live the same evening repeatedly as we put all these trucks to bed, or does this book take place over the course of a full week? Reader, I can tell you it feels like a week. Each truck receives two full page spreads to go to sleep, which is already too much. Then on top of that, there are two full spreads of introduction and two more full spreads of conclusion.

End it already!

Finally, the worst offense is that the writing itself is just plain poor. It's written in a simplistic rhyming scheme, which would be fine except that the text constantly screws it up! Not in an artistic-intent way, either. Consider:

Spinning, churning all day long Cement Mixer sings his whirly song

The second line has a full two extra syllables, despite being apparently meant to rhyme in symmetry with the first line. The only way to make this flow correctly is to slur "cement" and "mixer" into one syllable each, as if the story concerns trucks who are going to bed after bar close. "Sment mihrrr sings his whirly song", eat your heart out Shakespeare! I presume the audiobook is read by champagne-commercial-era Orson Welles.

Or take the following lines:

Pushing with his mighty blade Bulldozer works to smooth the grade

Written on the page, it looks passable, but try reading it out loud. You'll immediately trip over the second line with a feeling of encountering something foul. If we "scan" it to analyze the meter and where the emphasis falls, the problem reveals itself:

push ING / with HIS / migh TY / BLADE BULL doz / er WORKS / to CLEAR / the GRADE

Not only are the syllables off again, but the whole verse is iambic (ba DUM ba DUM ba DUM) until you reach "bulldozer", the poetic equivalent of stubbing your toe. The only way to make these lines scan is to change it to bullDOzer, an emphasis that is inherently offensive to any native English speaker. If I said to my kid on the street "wow, check out that truck towing a bull-DO-zer," he'd turn around and slap me full in the face and I'd deserve it. And no, literary smart-alecks in the audience, you can switch all the emphasis on these lines to trochic and it still doesn't work. Go ahead and let me know when you give up.

The writing here also engages in (argh) the sporadic and infuriating behavior of (huff) peppering the verse with non-sequitur noises, placed mid-sentence and not (groan) even at natural (boo) pauses. You want to force me to make inane truck sounds, book? Fine. Fuck you, but fine. Put them at the end of the verse! Is that asking so much?

I will say one nice thing: the illustrations make nice use of color, and try their best to imbue the trucks with some individual character. Crane Truck, for example, has a little teddy bear clutched in his arms. They're nice touches. The writing offers so little to work with, though, there's only so much the pictures can do.

KID VERDICT (2y-3y): Look, my kid is a maniac for trucks. He mainlines any and all truck content as often as he can get his hands on it. Even he thinks that this is too much exposition. Does that mean he's peacefully tucked in his bed, drifting off to sleep as I gently close the book and kiss him on the head? Of course not! He's just bored listening to this interminable goddamn book and is practicing shiatsu massage with his feet on my ribcage, or trying to climb the post of his bed like an orangutan. I have a book that's literally just stock photos of trucks and the name of the truck underneath, and he's twice as engaged with that book as he is with this thing.