Like many people my age, I first learned of Eloise not too long after she was created by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight. I grew up in Canada’s capital, a city swaddled in post-Edwardian probity and gloom. As much as hockey was a major preoccupation with kids my age, like many of my friends, I was also a big reader, and Eloise was something of a revelation. It was not only a window into a shimmering modern city I knew the name of but didn’t know much about, it also opened my innocent eyes to the notion that there must be people who didn’t just stay at fancy hotels, but who lived in them.

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I’ve since had five children and so I’ve serially read all of Eloise’s adventures set not only in New York, but in Paris and in Moscow, and at Christmas. Some of my kids loved the books. Some didn’t. Eloise herself can grate after multiple readings. Don’t get me started on the turtle.

Hilary Knight’s drawings however, electrified my kids—as they did me. Great children’s art is often great art, period. In the best situations it holds its own with the author’s work.  It’s almost impossible to think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland without also visualizing John Tenniel’s black and white drawings, or A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh without thinking of Ernest Shepard’s. In Roald Dahl’s books, the stories go hand in hand with Quentin Blake’s gloriously scratchy illustrations. With the Eloise books, I think it can fairly be said that Hilary’s drawings outrank the actual text.