REVIEW: Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, by Sherri Duskey Rinker

Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

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REVIEW: Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, by Sherri Duskey Rinker

Jane Psmith<br>Aug 03, 2026

66

20<br>11

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Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, Sherri Duskey Rinker (illus. Tom Lichtenheld; Chronicle Books, 2011).<br>There comes a time in the life of every young hominin when it can toddle on its own two feet beyond adult reach and begin to interact unsupervised with its environment. Naturally, this requires a rapid and encyclopedic categorization of all diversity within that environment: the hundreds and hundreds of edible plants and animals, the far greater number of dangerous ones, the way the landscape and its riches change with seasons and weather, &c.<br>Or, if you take the toddling hominin out of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and put it in a nice WEIRD climate-controlled house where food comes from about ten species1 at the grocery store and all the cool dangerous stuff is carefully hidden, dinosaurs.<br>Well, I was a dinosaur kid, and so was one (1) of mine — which meant I got a good excuse to catch up on the mumbledy-mumble years of paleontology I had missed2 — but for the rest of them it was construction vehicles. I have read aloud a great many books about construction vehicles. I have corrected several different mispronunciations of “hydraulic cylinder.” The first time I ever humiliated my daughter in front of her friends, she was four and I had just called a backhoe an excavator. So obviously, I can recite this entire book from memory.

It’s a nice book. The pictures are pretty. The words actually scan, which should be a given for children’s books and unfortunately is not. The plot, such as it is, consists of a whole slew of smiling trucks (Crane Truck, Cement Mixer, Dump Truck, and so forth) finishing their “rough-and-tough construction play” and going peacefully to bed beneath the moon. (The quiet hope is of course that the small child on your lap will emulate the trucks instead of getting up in five minutes to see if the big people are doing something interesting like eating ice cream or having an uninterrupted conversation.) The sunset colors of the illustrations are eye-catching without being lurid, the truck characters manage to strike the right balance between realism and friendly anthropomorphism, and my toddler loves to point out Crane Truck’s teddy bear. So I really do hate to be a pedant here when I point out that trucks do not, in fact, go to sleep. The people who operate trucks go to sleep. Trucks are like guns in this way.<br>Now, obviously one of the delights of picture books is that they don’t need to accurately represent reality. To pick on a few classics, you can’t actually enter a drawing, a bull who refused to fight the matadors would not be peacefully returned to his field, and I wouldn’t bet on the continued welfare of a child who took the place of a bear cub. Smiling trucks with teddy bears have nothing on being baked inside a cake for fantasy! And this particular brand of fantasy — look, toddler, this character who’s not actually a small child is just like you — has a long, proud history in children’s literature because kids love it. (See also George, Curious.) There don’t have to be people in Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site because the trucks basically are people.3 Fine.<br>And yet.<br>If I wanted to be Marxist about it, this is where I would start talking about the wholesale replacement of labor by capital in our collective imagination. It’s not enough that most live human activity is no longer economically viable without constantly suckling at the teat of coagulated labor — you could, I suppose, build a house entirely by hand and paid for with only cash, but it’s so impractical as to be virtually unheard-of — now we’ve removed any human actors from the picture entirely! And we didn’t have to: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel manages to be a charming and deeply humane story about construction vehicles without ever losing its focus on the actually interesting part, which is people and what they do with their machines. And yes, my tongue is a little bit in my cheek here (though I maintain that one of the secret joys of parenthood is the opportunity to develop increasingly deranged literary analyses of children’s media).4 But think for a moment about what it’s like to be a kid in the Year of Our Lord 2026.

I do a lot of the same things my mother did a generation ago. I play music. I read books. I look up the answers to my children’s questions when I don’t know them off the top of my head. I send pictures to various relatives who like to see how cute they are. I order pizza delivery on evenings I’m going out. But when I was little, these were all clear and distinct endeavors. To put on music, my mom had to open the little plastic box that held the cassette (yes, I’m old), slot it into the machine, press a button, and...