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Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk appeared in 1977. If you grew up in the US since then, there is a very good chance you have read her board books, or had them read to you, and an even better chance you recognize her cartoon animals. However, even as Boynton is being read everywhere, very likely because of her ubiquity, she is at the same time being forgotten. Though I imagine she would be the first to insist that there’s nothing more to her books than what’s on the surface, something special is at work in them. The Going to Bed Book (1982) snaps everything into focus.
I was a latecomer to Boynton. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I first read her. And when I first read her, I didn’t really read her—I endured the act of reading to my toddler while sleep deprived. I think the first time I read her was when I was reading Wordsworth’s Lucy poems for a class on British Romantic poetry. “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees”—I hallucinated those lines as I read aloud The Going to Bed Book’s final verse:
The moon is high. The sea is deep.
They rock
and rock
and rock
to sleep
This time, the 50th or 67th, I faintly entertained the thought that there was more here. That was probably too much effort, because I immediately fell asleep.
On waking, it came to me: We do not need to work harder when reading Boynton. Her work, especially when taken as a whole, rewards pause.
Since then, I’ve read almost all of her more than 85 books, listened to her albums, and paid high prices for the handful of her books that are, somehow, out of print. One of my most prized possessions is a framed print of The Going to Bed Book’s final spread. Another hangs next to my office door so students can see it on their way out: an elephant is lifted high on a seesaw by a pile of mice, and its caption reads: “Difficult things can be accomplished given enough enthusiasm, joy, and purpose.” Loving Boynton and being a completist go well together, because it doesn’t take very long to go through it all.
Success can be deceptive, and off-putting. Because Boynton has sold more than 90 million books, it may seem that her work, which began with greeting cards, is better understood as commodity than oeuvre. A book like Good Night, Good Night (1985), which is identical to The Going to Bed Book but for a few additional pages (and a song!), might invite such accusations.
Yet Boynton is always revisiting and reframing. For instance, ever the precise technician of book art, Boynton has periodically redrawn her books in order to correct printing errors and take advantage of new technologies. In at least one case she has “substantially revised” a previous book. At 108 pages, Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down (1986) nearly doubles the length of her scathing critique of the professional-managerial class, The Compleat Turkey (1980). She had a lot to say.
Self-reliance and interdependency often go together in Boynton’s books.
More often, Boynton’s revisionist impulse is subtle. Hippos Go Berserk opens with one lonely hippo calling two friends in search of company. Soon, a raucous house party erupts. In the sequel, Hippos Remain Calm (2023), written during the early days of the pandemic, we get the story of those two friends. Turns out the phone call was initially an unwelcome interruption to their socially distanced routine of outdoor walks and meditative breathing at home. The ensuing party now appears as an embodied, in-person release of pent-up energy. Boynton offers a similar perspective shift in But Not the Armadillo (2018), the long-awaited response to the cliffhanger ending of But Not the Hippopotamus (1982), in which (spoiler alert) the hippo turns out okay while the armadillo is left on its own. The armadillo (spoiler piled on spoiler) ultimately soars, as much as an armadillo can soar, but into happy solitude rather than hippo gregariousness.
Self-reliance and interdependency often go together in Boynton’s books. The armadillo, whom we are collectively beseeched to reassure, might find its motto in One, Two, Three! (1993)—“One is wonderful after a crowd”—and its theme song in “When Pigs Fly” (2012, performed by Ryan Adams): “I know you for a dreamer / ’Cause I’ve been a dreamer, too.” The Pookie books (2007–2023) are all about independence’s interdependencies. Featuring one of the only named characters in the Boyntonverse, they’re about a toddler whose mother encourages independence and self-expression. Cast in this light, books like Are You a Cow? (2012; answer: no, “You must be YOU / Now isn’t that great!”) and Hey! Look at You! (2024; encouragement through mirroring, with actual mirrored surfaces on the page) aren’t naively pro-individual. Ultimately, we sleep as we dream—alone. But the point of all this endless iterability, which The Going to Bed Book so perfectly crystallizes, is that so much of the experience is shared.
I may have been addled when I compared Wordsworth to Boynton. It did make sense at the time, though, because her days at Yale in the early 1970s brought her in proximity to critics like Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller. However, it’s those American Romantics, the Transcendentalists, with whom Boynton enjoys a connection through her Quaker upbringing. As troublesome as her characters often are, we might say they are nonetheless guided by an Inner Light. Their principle of collectivity, although seemingly chaotic, is nonetheless so radically egalitarian that lion and bunny can cozily tuck into bed together.
Boynton even contributed an illustration to an anthology on Thoreau: a contented hippo relaxes in an armchair, with the caption “Simplify, Simplify.” This is the core of her sensibility: repetition, simplicity, and insight. Even the apparent repetition in Boynton’s visual style is an indication more of a fully developed aesthetic vocabulary than of commodified reproducibility. Books like The Belly Button Book (2005)—which makes us hear “belly button” in a hippo toddler’s “BEE BO!”—show a maestro in full control of her craft.
Nowhere are Boynton’s many talents and longstanding thematic commitments more pronounced than in The Going to Bed Book. Its title announces the reliable routine ahead: no real story, just a sequence. A scrum of animals aboard a boat are getting ready for bed. Baths are taken, teeth are brushed, pajamas are donned, exercise, controversially, is done right before jumping into bed. It all seems so repetitive, if off-kilter. But the book’s final verse, never far from my mind, is one of the most devastating I have ever read.
It’s not as dark as Beckett’s “They give birth astride of a grave,” but the point is similar. The key to its delicate tone is that it’s not depicting death but something more primordial. Something like the state of zero stimulus that, for Freud, is the aim of all life. This may be Boynton’s master theme: “Stasis, disrupted by trouble, resolved by bedtime,” as a Public Books encomium to Beverly Cleary put it.
“The moon is high.” There are effortless moments when the dynamic between picture and text is just right. “The sea is deep.” The world of mediations melts away and everything narrows to a scene of encounter: perception, object, the vast space between. “We rock.” Form isn’t exhausted by repetition. “And rock.” It’s exhausted when abandoned too quickly.
When I read Boynton, for the span of a minute or two, and a few deep breaths, I hear and see the individual voice rise and fall like a wave, reabsorbed into a common, oceanic current. We are all connected by large forces, readying ourselves for dawn in linked fate. “And rock to sleep.” 
This article was commissioned by John Plotz.
