Goodnight Gorilla

"Goodnight Gorilla” is a children’s book written and illustrated by Peggy Rathman. The genre of a book, although containing some words, is a children’s picture book. The book starts off with a zoo keeper locking up the zoo. When the zoo keeper gets to the gorilla cage, the gorilla steals the keys without the zookeeper knowing. Secretly, the gorilla lets all of the animals out of their cages. Finally, as the zoo keeper lies down to get a good night’s sleep he realizes that all of the animals in the zoo followed him home! This time the wife takes a stab at it, everyone is safely put away, but the gorilla somehow manages to follow them home! The artwork in the book, although very simple is very well thought out. I feel as if the book was well illustrated for children in the fact that it’s very simple, it’s all cartoon like, and the pictures were all contained in the white border. Also, one thing that stuck out to me was that in every illustration that was depicted outside, there is a balloon. As the night is young the balloon is very big, but the later it gets the smaller the balloon gets. I think that overall the book is great. The one thing that I thought the book was missing was the conversation key. There were no conversations in the book, just the repetitive, “goodnight.” It’s short enough to hold a child’s attention and also it teaches a great lesson, the gorilla never left his friends behind.

Rathman, Peggy. Goodnight Gorilla. New York: Penguin Group, 1994.