The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge Gift Set: Night-light and Book

Rating:
Summary: A rediscovered classic
Review: My oldest son found an old, beat-up copy of this book at his grandmother's house 3 years ago. He was 3 at the time. He loved the story and the pictures. His younger brother, now 3, has become just as attached. The story is fun and exciting and helps us all understand that we all have something to contribute. If you like the other timeless books from this era (The Little Engine That Could, Mike Mulligan), then you'll truly enjoy this one.

Rating:
Summary: A rediscovered classic
Review: My oldest son found an old, beat-up copy of this book at his grandmother's house 3 years ago. He was 3 at the time. He loved the story and the pictures. His younger brother, now 3, has become just as attached. The story is fun and exciting and helps us all understand that we all have something to contribute. If you like the other timeless books from this era (The Little Engine That Could, Mike Mulligan), then you'll truly enjoy this one.

Rating:
Summary: A noble little lighthouse
Review: This is among the great children's books. Like other reviewers I did not discover it in my youth. But as a 50ish year old I read it and was moved. It is about a (relatively) little lighthouse on the Hudson River and the George Washington bridge, its new, and overpowering, neighbor (it was written in the 40's). The lighthouse feels insignificant. Its light was important,was its meaning, but is now insignificant next to the lights of the bridge's great towers. But the lighthouse is again needed and acknowledged as important and the message that we all have a role and a value is this books sweet and noble message.

Rating:
Summary: The brave little lighthouse
Review: When I was young I was obsessed with the notion that inanimate objects could, when no one was around, have lives entirely of their own. I watched movies like, "The Brave Little Toaster" obsessively and was delighted with any book, film, or commercial even that suggested such plotlines. Yet in all my ramblings I somehow missed the delightful "Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge". Chalk it up to the effects of a literary childhood that didn't dwell too deeply on books originally published in the 1940s. Having had the luck to find this book now, I'm pleased to report that this is an excellent picture book. Certainly it will have fans that read it as children themselves once upon a time. But just in case those people wondered if it was good enough to create fans amongst adults who never saw it when they were kids, allow me to put your minds at rest. It is as fresh today as it ever was.

This is one of those tales in which advancements in technology and power are looked upon with a critical eye. The little red lighthouse sits all by itself at the shore of the Hudson River. A happy little building, the lighthouse cheerily watches the ships sail past it during the day. At night the lighthouse keeper arrives and turns on the gas that lights the lighthouse in the dark. Sometimes, on particularly dangerous nights, a clock in the lighthouse is wound so as to ring a loud iron bell. Everything's going hunky-dory until one day a group of men arrive and begin digging behind the lighthouse. Before the lighthouse knows what is happening a gigantic bridge has grown beside the little building, dwarfing it. This wreaks havoc with the little lighthouse's self-esteem, as you might imagine. Things don't improve any when the bridge turns on a gigantic beam of light that night. Then to top it all off the lighthouse keeper doesn't arrive, driving the little red lighthouse into a major funk. It's only when a dangerous fog overtakes the harbor and the bridge explains its real job (to alert airplanes to its presence) that the little red building realizes that it's just as important as ever. The books ends with, "And every day the people who go up Riverside Drive in New York City turn to look at it. For there they both are - the great gray bridge and the little red lighthouse. If you don't believe it, go see for yourself".

If you're like myself and you don't happen to know every bridge, borough, and beach in the New York City area, then it might be of some interest to you that the great gray bridge is in fact the George Washington Bridge. Having never seen it, I can't guarantee that the little lighthouse is still there. Still, the story inspired by it is a lovely piece of work. The plot has some similarities to "Mike Mulligan" since it deals with old buildings/machines facing obsolescence of one sort or another. Kids reading this story may enjoy the lengthy descriptions of ships given space here. They may also feel a bit of sympathy on a personal level with the small lighthouse that must sit in the shadow the gigantic bridge.

The plot, however, could have been saved or destroyed by the illustrations. In this particular case some benevolent god decided to give Lynd Ward the chance to draw for this tale. Choosing a style that could only seriously be described as, "inspired", Ward draws every building, boat, and person with great realism. Though the lighthouse is completely capable of showing such emotions as pride, surprise, and downright misery, it always does so while looking like a real building. Ward doesn't slap some cartoony eyes and facial features on otherwise accurate inanimate objects. If a steamer is going to say hello then it's eyes will be windows and its mouth a grand deck. If the great gray bridge is going to discuss the nature of its existence its mouth will be the space between its cables and its eyes the points where the cables connect to the towers. Best of all, Ward uses only four colors or so (black, white, red, and blue) yet suggests entirely different shades and tones with his drawing style. The result is a book that looks as good as it sounds.

Some older picture books tend to age very badly as time goes on. They either rely on old-fashioned "values" and techniques or they bog themselves down with affected styles. In the case of "The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge", the book fits in beautifully with its picture book brothers and sisters today. I suspect that hundreds or even thousands of books have tried to copy the style that this book made so famous. All that is well and good, but the original story is well worth looking up on its own merits alone. It is a wonderful book.