The Hello, Goodbye Window

A young girl narrates a visit to her grandparents' house, and the kitchen window at its center becomes the whole world of the story: she and her grandmother, whom she calls Nanna, play peekaboo through the glass from opposite sides, she helps Nanna in the garden outside it, and she listens each evening while her grandfather, Poppy, plays the only song he knows on his harmonica. The window is where hellos happen when she arrives and where goodbyes happen at the end, and the book closes on exactly that moment, her parents pulling up to collect her, a small, plainly stated sadness that Norton Juster's text lets stand without softening it, closing simply on the girl's own recognition that "it just happens that way sometimes."

Chris Raschka illustrates Juster's present tense narration in loose, scribbled lines and patchy fields of mixed media color that read like a child's own drawing while doing far more controlled work underneath that impression, mixing exterior garden scenes with tight, close up vignettes of Nanna's and Poppy's faces. The pacing suits an actual bedtime or after visit read aloud, unhurried and circular rather than building toward a plot, and its plain honesty about a happy visit still ending in a goodbye has made it a common choice for children processing a grandparent's distance or a recent visit of their own. The book runs a standard thirty two pages but reads more like a picture album than a plotted story, its short present tense sentences suited to a young listener who wants the visit described rather than dramatized, and its two named grandparents, Nanna and Poppy, give a child a specific pair of characters to hold onto across what is otherwise a loosely structured string of small, remembered moments.