In the Night Kitchen is one of the best books to read aloud I have ever had the pleasure of coming across. You can almost feel the noise in the quiet. And as I said at the start of this section, I think the night-time light has a lot to do with why this book draws you in so much. They are the kind of images that stay with you forever. The gorgeous deep blue of the artificially lit starry night sky of In the Night Kitchen plays a prominent visual role in the book, setting a definite mood of city night-time excitement, the kind we might have imagined as a child and might still imagine as an adult goes on without us while we sleep.īut the main thing about these illustrations is their vibrancy and the powerful imagery they contain. We love the perfectly illogical logic of dream captured here, with the floating and falling and then rising up only to drift down again and back into deep sleep at the end. 'And that's why, thanks to Mickey, we all have cake in the morning.' Then Mickey gives a triumphant cock-a-doodle-doo and slides back down and straight into bed, "cakefree and dried". He flies up and up and over a stunning New York cityscape with food packages and containers for buildings, and reaches the top of a huge bottle of milk, dives down into it, comes up again with a jug full and pours it down into the massive bowl held by the expectant chanting bakers below. But half way through the process, Mickey pokes out, now wearing a dough pilot suit and points out their mistake ('I'm not the milk and the milk's not me! I'm Mickey!'), before jumping onto some bread dough, molding it into a plane and taking off, leaving the bakers below shouting desperately for milk for the morning cake. Mickey falls from his bed through the dark, out of his clothes and into a huge bowl of batter in a noisy night kitchen where three fat Oliver Hardy faced bakers mistake him for milk, mix him in batter and pop him in the oven to bake him into a 'Mickey cake'. In the Night Kitchen is an account of a little boy's dream. It has never once gone out of favour (other books of his have periods of glory followed by periods of ostracism before usually returning to glory, depending on shifting moods and interests and a natural attraction to the pile of newly arrived books). We got this for our son before he was two and it has been a favourite with him (and us) ever since. In our case at least, this enthusiastic reaction was immediate from adults and child alike.
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