The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch

Mortimer reads at first like a comic domestic sketch: it’s bedtime, Mortimer refuses, Mortimer makes a racket, and every adult who enters the scene fails to quiet him. But beneath that simple spine of plot sits the set of a small stage where Munsch — working in his characteristic oral-storytelling register — orchestrates an escalating comedy about power, performativity, and who gets to speak in a household. The story’s origins as a circle-time tale are audible on every page: the prose is built for a voice, for timing, for a delighted audience who will clap, bray, and join in. 

Form and voice are where Mortimer’s primary pleasures lie. The language is lean, direct, and emphatically aural: short commands (“BE QUIET!”), onomatopoeic eruptions, and the comic repetition that trains a child’s anticipation — and an adult’s exasperation. Because the narrative was honed in live performance, the text depends on rhythm more than on psychological interiority; Mortimer himself is less a rounded character than a centrifugal force around which family dynamics rotate. This is not a failing but a technique: the book makes noise itself, and in doing so it teaches a reader (or a listener) to measure the gap between sound and social order. 

Michael Martchenko’s illustrations, a long-time collaborator with Munsch, are perfectly pitched to the text’s comic energy. His drawings supply the domestic detail the prose forgoes — the cluttered rooms, the weary faces, the piling-up of siblings — while amplifying the farce: gestures are slightly exaggerated, the adults’ facial contortions cartoonishly earnest, Mortimer’s mischiefing posture exuberant. The interplay of word and image produces a classic picture-book economy: text sets the beat; pictures supply the register and the sly subtext. Readers who know Munsch’s work will recognize how integral Martchenko’s line is to the comic timing. 

If one reads Mortimer on a level beyond entertainment, it opens into ethical and philosophical questions about authority and merit. The adults in the book arrive in procession — mother, father, siblings, even the police — each claiming the moral right or institutional competence to enforce silence. Yet their interventions are performative and easily distracted; ultimately they spend their energy arguing with one another rather than addressing Mortimer’s insistence. The book thus stages a reversal: the adult world, which imagines itself in possession of rules and enforcement, collapses into quarrel, while Mortimer — for a time at least — remains the calm center (and at the end, the sleeper). It is a sly comment on how authority can be more theatrical than effective. 

Pedagogically, Mortimer is a masterclass in read-aloud dynamics. Teachers and parents use it not merely to amuse but to teach turn-taking, volume control in storytelling, and the pleasures of performative language. The story invites children to produce noise and then to watch the consequences of that noise — a safe rehearsal of transgression and resolution. Its compactness makes it perfect for circle time, and the text’s familiarity (still a staple in many classrooms and libraries) encourages group participation and the rehearsal of social roles. 

Critically — and briefly — the book is not without limits. Its focus on noise as misbehaviour risks a reductive reading in which the child is a problem to be cured rather than a subject whose agency or needs might be investigated. Unlike some contemporary picture books that linger on emotional nuance or parental reflection, Mortimer keeps its gaze squarely on the comic mechanics of bedtime resistance; the adults remain broad types rather than complex subjects. Yet this narrowness is arguably part of its design: by refusing to moralize, Munsch preserves the anarchic pleasure of the child’s point of view.

In the end, Mortimer’s value is double: it is a reliably funny read-aloud that teaches the choreography of story performance, and it is a small, sharp parable about the social theatre of authority. For readers who appreciate how children’s books can be both mischief and method, Mortimer remains a compact, instructive delight — a text that still rewards hearing aloud and looking closely at the pictures that finish its sentences. 

Recommended for: storytime, early-elementary classrooms, and any adult who enjoys the sound of a good rebellion before lights-out.