This beautiful children’s book features a child on the front, looking wistfully at the moon, accompanied by a ratty yellow bunny rabbit. As we open the cover, we find him sitting on his bed playing with a rocket, and we learn that he has a solar system on his wall. As he drifted off to sleep at night, he would look at the planets, but by far his favorite was the moon. Sometimes he would borrow his father’s binoculars and look at the real moon outside.
For Christmas, he received an atlas of the moon, and he spent hours reading it, dreaming of going on a visit to each of the craters. He began a scrapbook with newspaper clippings from all the space expeditions by NASA. He went to the library and borrowed books about the moon, and he began to dream that astronauts would someday find a way to walk on the moon itself.
Then one day that dream came true! Knowing they were up there, walking on the moon that very minute, the boy couldn’t sleep. He stared out his window, wondering what it would be like to walk on the moon.
At 3:00 in the morning, still unable to sleep, he turned on the television and saw the transmission from the moon. He was so excited that he couldn’t fall asleep until morning, and when he did, he dreamed that he was on the moon too, walking with them.
At the end of the book, the author, Mark Haddon, reveals that he was that little boy, and confesses that the moon still has an amazing power over him, to transport him off to a place where dreams really do come true.
I enjoyed this story for the simple sweetness it conveys and the credence it lends to a little boy’s imagination.
(This book was first published in 1996 by HarperCollins Publishers Limited and was illustrated by Christian Birmingham.)