“Night-Night, Forest Friends” by Annie Bach is one of my family’s favorite bedtime books.
Read on to learn why I especially love this book in the full vegan review, or scroll to the bottom for simple ratings.
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Full Review
I’ve probably read “Night-Night, Forest Friends,” to my baby several hundred times. The book stands out for its wonderfully flowing rhymes, and adorable illustrations. The words, in my opinion, are superior to the forced rhymes of the similar but strangely more popular bedtime board book, “Time for Bed.”
A quick synopsis
“Night-Night, Forest Friends” shows parents of different species putting their babies to sleep in the forest. In the beginning of the book, while the families head home for bed, we see an owl asleep in a tree. Once all of the families have gone to bed, the owl, now awake, “hoots a lullaby.”
Is “Night-Night Forest Friends” Vegan-Friendly?
“Night-Night Forest Friends,” is vegan-friendly. There’s no reference to eating or using animals in any way.
Notes on gender
While this website is focused on anti-speciesism, I’m really looking for books that avoid promoting any type of supremacy, whether that’s White supremacy or patriarchy, and I try to comment when I’m able to perceive something noteworthy.
“Night-Night, Forest Friends” does a good job avoiding gender stereotypes and heteronormativity. Only two of the families have gendered parents – there’s a single papa rabbit, and a single mama doe, but there are no gendered terms for the other parents who are presented alone or in pairs, and none for any of the babies – leaving plenty of room for a narrator or child’s imagination to fill in the blanks.
An Anti-speciesist reading
In “Night-Night, Forest Friends”, the animals exist as themselves, in nature. They’re not wearing human clothes or speaking like humans. The bears sleep in a den, the squirrels in a tree, the chipmunks in a burrow, and so on.
In other words, they’re not presented as stand-ins for humans, at least for the most part. That’s one of the things I love about this book, and it’s actually pretty rare in children’s books.
When non-human animal forms are used as stand-ins for humans, the characters have a “cute appeal,” but their story overwrites how those species actually live in our world today, something I think children should know about.
Wade in the weeds with me
I’m not an animal behaviorist, but I’ll admit a few of the activities the parents do seem anthropomorphized.
Would bears really rock their cub to sleep? I’m not sure, but my baby loves it and even anticipates when I rock him while reading this line. Would papa rabbit tuck his babies into beds of brush? Maybe, in a way?
These activities actually don’t bother me. They feel more like approximate translations of real animal behavior – soothing, affection, protection – into gestures a human baby could relate to, rather than writing human behavior over animal behavior.
However, imposing Western nuclear family structures do make some of the animals seem a little like avatars. Except for the frogs, each family is shown with one or two parents.
But in reality, foxes live in packs. And Come to think of it, foxes are usually nocturnal, though not always. Deer live in herds led by a dominant male. Maybe we’re trading in some realism here for the absence of patriarchy.
A final nitpick and other thoughts on a book I love
There is one little thing at the end of “Night-Night, Forest Friends” that irks me. The books says “our forest friends all head to bed,” but then on the next page the owl is awake and hooting a lullaby. Each time I read the book, I feel a little sad for the owl who is excluded from “our friends.”
Maybe because the owl is nocturnal, and the reader and families featured in the book are presumably diurnal (awake during the day), our social lives do not cross with the owl. Maybe the owl has a bunch of nocturnal friends who sleep while the robin sings a daytime lullaby – that would make a nice sequel.
I’ve actually been avoiding checking out the real sequel to this book since it takes place on a farm.
Speaking of trying to avoid different forms of suprematist thinking, I appreciate how this book shows that the owl lives on a different schedule than the other animals. Down with the diurnal default!
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Vegan Rating: A
Anti-speciesist Rating: A-
Overall Rating: A
Age recommendation: 0+