Tag: children’s literature
The British Socialist Who Rewrote the World for Children
There was a time, not so long ago, when things were perfect for the children up at the bright-faced house, at the edge of London. Heaps of toys in the nursery, an enchanted garden that rolled on for ages, and there were always buns for tea. Mother forever merry, forever there. But then Father died, or was imprisoned for treason, or his business partner absconded to Spain with their money, and the family had to abandon all the best
What Should a Queer Children’s Book Do?
Recently, my five-year-old son brought home a picture book from our local library called “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” and, when he asked me to read it at bedtime that evening, I felt a profound resignation. The book’s cover features two smiling grooms in skinny-fit suits standing beneath an arbor, and a tiny flower girl, about my son’s age, wearing a bright yellow dress. The girl is Chloe, and one of the men, Bobby, is her favorite uncle: “He took her rowing
Who Jason Reynolds Writes His Best-sellers For
“When I Was the Greatest” does not draw directly on Reynolds’s relationship with his own father. (“It’s not that he was absent—it’s that I did not want him around when I was young,” he said.) But their cycles of intimacy and estrangement provide some of the emotional groundwater of the book and its portrayal of a fatherless household. In all of his novels, Reynolds borrows liberally from reality, fictionalizing his own life and the lives of friends and family. “This
Edward Gorey’s Toys | The New Yorker
Killing children is generally frowned upon, but Edward Gorey did it all the time. He squashed them with trains, fed them to bears, poisoned them with lye, forced them to swallow tacks, watched them waste away, and burned them in fires; on his watch, they died of everything from fits to flying into bits. In perhaps the most popular of Gorey’s eight abecedarian books, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” twenty-six children, beginning with Amy “who fell down the stairs” and ending with