The Hello Goodbye Window

 By Norton Juster
Illustrated by Chris Raschka

This is the first picture book by the author of the Phantom Tollbooth, which is one of my favourite books.  It's a real classic.

The Hello Goodbye window is not a classic.  It has no focus or message or point, and the title is totally misleading.  It reads like an unedited brainstorm.

 One of the things that irritated me the most is how the grandfather plays harmonica and on the last page the main character muses about how she'll marry a man who plays harmonica when she gets older.  I'm so tired of all these books for kids ending in marriage.  Like that's the ultimate end goal, or that's the only way to have a happy ending.  And it's so lazily tacked on; the harmonica only features in this one page and isn't even related to the point of the story about the window.

There are all these nostalgia scenes like, "I take a nap and nothing happens until I wake up" that are supposed to be common memories for the average kid.  But if all of the memories are so banal, so generic, then why read the book?

There are maybe four pages about the window, and then there's a page at the end where the author tries to insist that the book was about the window all along, but because it ultimately ends with the main character fantasizing about a future marriage, it feels like there are three different endings that the author couldn't choose between.

When I read this with my daughter, I skip the last page and it's a bit of an improvement.