Kids’ Lit is Complex

Bruce Handy returned to reading children’s books in the way that most adults do: as a parent, reading them to his kids. He realized, however, that he was gleaning a distinct pleasure, cherishing them as “works of art.” He would turn eventually to writing his own children’s books, but that would come later. In Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, he aims to redirect adult attention towards kids’ books – not just to read them to kids – but to read them for themselves. Not only to fuel nostalgia, but to recognize how our own perspectives have shifted since childhood encounters. As Ursula K Le Guin, the science fiction and fantasy author, puts it: “That shift and deepening of meaning can be a revelation both about the book and yourself.”

Handy is quick to acknowledge that children’s literature is anything but simple: “It should go without saying that the best children’s literature is every bit as rich and rewarding in its concerns, as honest and stylish in execution, as the best adult literature – and also as complicated, stubborn, conflicted, and mysterious.” The best kids’ authors have a “subversive” view of the world. After all, like their target audience, they are gazing at the world from down-up. As Alison Lurie puts it in Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature, they see “the chewing gum stuck to the underside of polished mahogany tables and the hems of silk dresses held up with safety pins.”

Unpeeling Layers in Pooh

During his re-readings, Handy found that some books held up well, better than expected. Others sagged or flopped in unexpected ways. Curious George was duller than he recalled, while A Wrinkle in Time felt a tad “preachy.” Some, like AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner exuded deep messages and many layers, while also being fun.

Take Christopher Robin’s conversation with Pooh:

“I’m not going to do Nothing anymore.”
“Never again?” [asks Pooh]
“Well not so much. They don’t let you.”

This could be an indictment of adult productivity norms, or of grown-up pretensions about appearing constantly busy. It can also signify the passage of childhood, entailing the loss of a stage when doing “nothing” was perfectly acceptable in the world of beady-eyed and wise stuffed toys.

Mooning Over Goodnight Moon

At Chelsea Clinton’s high school graduation, her father, who was the President then, intentionally dropped the names of three children’s books that were sure to evoke moist eyes in listening parents: Goodnight Moon, Curious George, The Little Engine That Could. Handy takes umbrage at Bill Clinton’s implied suggestion that these three titles are equivalent. The author even elevates Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown above adult titles like The Great Gatsby or Beloved for being one of the most weighty forces on young Americans.

Goodnight Moon prods kids to explore the world beyond their own miniature bodies. Published originally in 1947, sales skyrocketed only in the 60s and 70s, but those figures have surprisingly held up. Each year, to date, it sells about 800,000 copies.

Margaret Wise Brown IRL

Brown died at the age of 42 in 1952, and she had written about 100 books by then. Not only did she seem to have an instinctive feel for what children would like, she had actually studied to be a children’s writer. She remained inordinately curious, taking in the world as a voracious child would. Her illustrator, Clement Hurd said about her,  “Her genius came from her extraordinary memory of feelings and emotions way back to her earlier years.” In her works, she is alert to how everything can still seem miraculous and surprising to children, and to how a single room – “the great green room” – can feel vast and wondrous.

Who was she then? Despite her grandmotherly name, Wise Brown was not a frumpy or even sweet-tempered old lady, knitting socks and rocking on a rocking chair. In a 1946 profile, Life magazine described her as “a tall, green-eyed, ash blonde in her early thirties with a fresh outdoors look about her.” She was colorful, sophisticated and lived in a Greenwich Village apartment with a host of creatures: a dog, a cat, a goat and a flying squirrel.

Penning Realist Books

Born in 1910, her father worked for the American Manufacturing Company, which “made rope and twine and sacks.” Wise had always been a dreamer, but she wasn’t ever disciplined. A college professor called her a “genius without talent.” She had grown up well-off and might have been flippant about money. But she did not spend much either. “Except for clothes, champagne and flowers, Miss Brown hasn’t much interest in spending,” as Life put it. She was always brimming with book ideas. She claimed to finish first drafts in 20 minutes, “and then spend two years polishing.”

After breaking off an engagement with a “good” Southern boy, she moved to New York and drifted for some time: signing up for writing courses at Columbia, then studying to be a teacher. She didn’t take to teaching, but she was entranced by children – by the way they used language, and manipulated words without adult self-consciousness. When she finally took a course centered on writing for children, she found her calling. Her teacher, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, believed in the “Here and Now” approach to children’s writing: in stories set in the real world rather than in fantasies or fairy tales. Mitchell’s own stories were rather flat and boring.

But Brown would go on to use the Here and Now approach with a special flair that evoked the magic of earlier classics like Cinderella or Red Riding Hood. She stayed a prolific writer, publishing about 3 to 5 books a year for many years. She noted that writing for children was much trickier than it seemed. As she put it, “Children are keen as wild animals, and also as timorous. So you can’t be ‘too funny’ or ‘too scary’ or ‘too many worded.’ All these things are not as easy as they sound for grown people.”

Entering Kids’ Minds

To inhabit a child’s viewpoint, she didn’t merely rely on her own memories. She lay down in fields, picking daisies and watching bugs as only children would. Of course her language was imbued with poetry and wit, influenced as she was by Gertrude Stein, whose sole kids’ book “she helped edit.”

She also understood that children primarily sought security. In The Important Book (1949), she writes:

The important thing about the sky is that it is always there.
It is true that it is blue,
And high,
And full of clouds,
And made of air.
But the important thing about the sky is that it is always there.

The Little Island captures a child’s contradictory urges to both fit in and stand out:

And it was good to be a little island.
A part of the world
And a world of its own
All surrounded by the bright blue sea.

While Margaret was able to occupy a child’s viewpoint with astonishing felicity, she wasn’t particularly fond of real children. As she observed: “To be a writer for the young, one has to love not children but what children love.” She stayed single all her life and didn’t have kids. Even her death had a certain zaniness to it. Admitted to a hospital in France for a surgery, on recovery, she attempted a spunky cancan kick to prove to the nurses that she was as robust as ever. Unfortunately, she lost consciousness, having apparently dislodged a blood clot that traveled to her brain. She died a few hours later, at the early age of 42.

Toting Up Works for Tots

Very close to Goodnight Moon on the popularity charts was Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar – a creature that starts out eating stodgy stuff like apples and pears, but ends up gorging on cakes and ice-creams before its miraculous emergence as a debutante butterfly. The Snowy Day, published in 1962, describes Peter waking up to a carpet of whiteness. Nothing earth shattering happens apart from Peter stowing away a snowball in his pocket which melts into a damp stain. More noticeably, its white author depicted a black protagonist, after noting their absence in bestselling kids’ books.

Handy sweeps across other kid-lit faves, dredging up interesting factoids about their creators. For instance, Theoder Geisel aka Dr. Seuss contributed to the screenplay “Rebel Without a Cause.” At one point, Dr. Seuss had even tried to hawk a machine that would predict kids’ appearances based on to-be parental visages. (Hope this does not spark off a smart-aleck AI app, if there aren’t a few already).

Falling Back in Love

Moving across kids’ life stages, before they turn into tedious adults, Handy covers those he is personally drawn to like Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter and CS Lewis. Fortunately, he writes this book as a grown-up child would: without trying to be clever or academic or prim. He writes as most kids would about works they love: unafraid to express his feelings, even if stiff, eyebrow-raising Adults might tick him off.

References

Bruce Handy, Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, Simon & Schuster, 2025