In a fourth-floor walk-up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on a Tuesday night in January 2025, the Marais family read Owl Moon for the forty-third time. The reader was Esme Marais, thirty-six, an editor for a small university press. The audience was her four-year-old, Otto, in a faded blue sleep sack, holding a stuffed badger named Brisket.
The forty-third reading was not better than the forty-second. Esme will say that this is the point. A picture book at age four is not a one-time experience. It is, more accurately, a kind of small house you move into. You stop noticing the wallpaper. You learn where the light switch is. You come to know exactly when the page turns.
Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen, with John Schoenherr's snow-laden paintings, was one of seventeen books that became the rotating bedtime canon of the Marais household during Otto's fourth year. The list was not curated. It assembled itself, as these things do, by what Otto demanded.
The seventeen, in no particular order, were these: Owl Moon; The Snowy Day; Bread and Jam for Frances; Make Way for Ducklings; Goodnight Moon, still, at four; The Tomten; Time of Wonder; Blueberries for Sal; Roxaboxen; The Story of Ferdinand; Frog and Toad Are Friends; The Bear Snores On; Stellaluna; A Hole Is to Dig; Sylvester and the Magic Pebble; Little Bear's Visit; and a small dark book called The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson, won at a library raffle the previous year.
Esme kept a list because she is, by training, a person who keeps lists. She also kept a small notebook on the bedside table in which she wrote, on most nights, a single line about the reading. Some of the lines were observations. Some were notes for her own work. Some were stray sentences about the day.
By April she had four months of entries. Otto noticed for the first time tonight that the boy in Owl Moon does not have a name. Otto cried at the part with the magic pebble, again. Otto wanted to skip Frances tonight, then changed his mind.
The repetition was the work. This is something parents come to know and outside observers tend to miss. A four-year-old does not read The Snowy Day twenty-eight times in a year because he cannot remember the plot. He reads it because he is, slowly and seriously, learning the shape of a story by feel. The way one learns a folk song.
Pierre Marais, Esme's husband, a freelance lighting designer, did about a third of the readings. The two of them developed unspoken specialties. Pierre read the longer Sendak. Esme read the McCloskey. Make Way for Ducklings, with its policeman Michael and its eight named ducklings, was read by whoever had the better voice for the policeman that night.
The canon was conservative. Esme is aware of this. There were newer books in the house, prize-winners, beautifully designed objects from small presses she admired professionally. Otto handled them, looked at them, occasionally requested them. He did not, however, ask for them at bedtime.
Bedtime is not the time for the new, the children's book scholar Maria Tatar has written. Otto, who had never read Maria Tatar, would have agreed. At bedtime he wanted the badger Brisket and he wanted Frances eating bread and jam for the eighth day in a row.
The mid-year crisis, if it can be called that, came in late February. Otto refused, for nine consecutive nights, to read anything but Goodnight Moon. Esme, who had read Goodnight Moon several hundred times across Otto's life and the life of his older sister, Mira, who was now seven and reading Charlotte's Web on her own, felt something like despair.
She read Goodnight Moon on the ninth night with what she described, in her notebook, as professional resignation. On the tenth night Otto asked for Roxaboxen, and the small dark spell broke.
The pattern, looking back, was rhythmic. Otto would fix on one book for a stretch, sometimes a week, sometimes longer, then return to the rotation. Esme came to believe, though she would not insist on it, that the fixations corresponded to something he was working on inside himself. A new fear. A new sibling tension. A trip to a grandparent's house in Quebec that had not gone as planned.
Pierre, less inclined to interpretation, simply read what was handed to him.
Some of the canon predated Otto. Blueberries for Sal had been Mira's at the same age, and Esme's before that, in a different copy, the one her own mother had read to her in a New Hampshire farmhouse in 1991. The Marais copy is from a 1976 printing, found at the Strand for seven dollars. The cover is taped.
The repeated books develop, over a year, what Esme calls pre-reading reading. Otto in May could recite the entire text of Goodnight Moon, turning the pages at the right moments, eyes closed. He could not yet read. He had simply absorbed the book whole.
By June, Otto was four and a half. The canon had begun, almost imperceptibly, to expand. He requested, for the first time, Where the Wild Things Are, which Esme had been holding in reserve for reasons she had not articulated. He requested it twice and then put it back on the shelf and did not request it again for six weeks.
Mira, the older sister, sometimes wandered in during the readings and sat on the floor, ostensibly bored. She would correct, occasionally, a misread word. Esme noticed that Mira knew the canon too, by osmosis, even the books that had not been in heavy rotation when Mira was four.
The bedtime ritual is, in some families, a battleground. In others it is a fragile peace. In the Marais household it was, during this year, a kind of small library hour, conducted nightly under the dimmer of a paper-globe lamp from IKEA that had been there since before the children.
The canon will end. Esme knows this. Otto will turn five, then six, and at some point will want chapter books, and at some later point will want to read alone in his bed with a flashlight, and at some still later point will not want a parent in the room at all.
The seventeen books will stay on the shelf. Some of them will be passed to a younger cousin in Montreal. Some will be kept for, perhaps, a grandchild. The taped Blueberries for Sal will move with the family if they move. The notebook on the bedside will fill up and be replaced.
On the night Esme finished the entry that became this article, she wrote one line: Otto fell asleep before the owl came. She closed the book. She left the lamp on for Pierre, who was working late.
