The Good Night Garage
For ages 3+
Wonderful and beautifully illustrated rhyming story about all the great night time vehicles and teams hard at work to keep our roads safe and clean, our lives protected, shelves stocked and more…
By Tori Kosara, illustrated by Meg Hunt (Flying Eye Books, 2024)
First of all… check out the cover!! All of my favourite colours… basically a pastel-tastic rainbow on dark blues, purples, blacks… and the Ccccute animal characters. Oh, and then there’s the raised artwork… so tactile and collectable too.
Oh hang on a minute… the end papers (the inside cover artwork) are brilliant - an illustration of each vehicle with the name beside? Genius. And… can we please have multi Do you know how many kids LOVE books about trucks…? I even had a young child once at the bookshop whose parents were literally after any book in the world that had bin lorries featured… he was OBSESSED. I love these hyper focus obsessions in young children - their brain just loves something about a topic and they want to know more, want to collect, hoard, admire and adore the process too. Did you have an obsession about something in particular as a youngster?
Onto the story then. Let’s take a bedtime trip to ‘Motor Isle’… Honouring the work that’s done by people of all different professions to keep our lives clean, safe and happy whether it’s sweeping the streets, collecting the rubbish/recycling, delivering stock to supermarkets, picking up passengers on night buses, or marking the roads. The story includes sensory prompts for children listening to the story around the smell of the bin lorry, or the sound of the emergency services sirens or ‘roar/hiss/crash’ of the bins. Then when day breaks ‘The Good Night Garage’ goes to sleep when others wake up for a brand new sunny day - unaware or aware perhaps of the night time effort.
The rhyming text flows very well, the illustrations are interesting, colourful, and characterful.
This is a wonderful nod to all those who have professions featured in ‘The Good Night Garage’, and a very sweet, educational storybook.
Words © Tori Kosara & Illustrations © Meg Hunt
