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Children’s Books that Bother Me
As I have noticed an interest in children’s literature among Ricochet commentators, I would like to write about some less interesting books we have recently received as gifts. Many people may disagree with me. After all we received these books as gifts, and I see from the Amazon reviews that they are much loved with some folks. “Amazing”, “wonderful” and “gorgeous” are the words that bubble up when people discuss this book. I disagree and Ricochet seems the place to air misfit opinions, especially when I suspect the consensus has been established by leftists. I think generally speaking there is far too little judgement these days and I think children’s behavior, parenting and children’s books as well as other cultures and religions should all be fair game for civilized discussion.
The first example of a book that bothers me is the much loved Benji Davies book, Storm Whale, published in 2013 and given to our kids by a (liberal) friend, who, excuse me but it’s true, last read a book in its entirety in 1998 and who is guided entirely in these things by his wife, a lefty with the sense of humor of a doorknob, in part to contest my ideologically worrisome assertion that today’s children’s books aren’t good because they have very few words on the page and no plot. I thanked him enthusiastically, and we parted on the best of terms, but The Storm Whale only confirms my suspicions that any children’s book published after 2000 (or even earlier – I am a hardliner) is worthless.
First of all, the protagonist’s name is Noi. What kind of name is Noi? Of what origin? It’s clearly superior to John or Peter, and if you read your child a book in which the protagonist’s name is Noi then you are obviously an educated, openminded, interesting person with cool sneakers who would never read Kai and Tabitha a story about a boy named Tom or a girl named Laura.
Noi is a funny, genderless, rootless little thing, clad throughout the whole book in a sort of close-fitting black cap that seems to fasten under his chin and the obligatory classic French mariner t-shirt beloved in the high-income enclaves where Storm Whale is a hit (full disclosure: my kids wear them), among parents. I doubt any child could ever truly relate to such an insipid muppet.
Noi lives alone with his father, a fisherman. Again, my alarm bells were going crazy here. Single father. (“There are all sorts of families, Kai!”) A single mother would push all sorts of buttons. And why are women always depicted as maternal? What nonsense! Men can look after small children. Even macho working-class men, as Noi’s father clearly is. (He is in fact the sort of brute that repels the sort of people who adore The Storm Whale, but we shouldn’t split hairs). The social messaging wallops the reader.
Noi doesn’t go to school or play with toys, but wanders around bleak wintry northern beaches, depicted with self-conscious artistry by Davies (clearly angling for praise for the pictures), and one day finds a whale which he takes home and puts in the bathtub. As one does, especially the kind of helicoptered, hyper-scheduled child for whom Storm Whale is intended. His dad makes him put it back in the sea, and that’s a Good Thing, because of Nature.
When I dutifully read this aloud to my daughter (it takes about 11 seconds to read and is therefore good for parents who have more important things to do), she looked blankly back at me at the end and said “OK”. Children are very alive to adult machinations. We then went off to get a book from the Arthur series by Marc Brown or Russell and Lilian Hoban’s Bedtime for Frances, both of which were written in prehistoric times when there were girls’ restrooms in schools and children were gendered and had mothers and fathers, who were women and men, respectively.
The second book which we received as a gift and which also bothers me is Quentin Blake’s Mrs Armitage Queen of the Road. Quentin Blake will be familiar to many as the illustrator of the Roald Dahl books, famous for his angular sketchy illustrations of angular, quirky, long-nosed Hampsteady-looking people.
Anyway, Mrs. Armitage receives a car from her Uncle Cosmo (again, these Quirky names) and she and her dog Breakspear (more Quirky) go for a ride and Mrs. Armitage drives really terribly. Bits of the car breaks off over the course of the book until it basically looks like a motorcycle and eventually Uncle Cosmo and his motorcycle gang adopt Mrs. Armitage and that’s Really Funny because you as a sophisticated urban parent can chortle quietly to yourself about the hilarity of a motorcycle gang going to the Crazy Duck Café to drink banana fizz and how funny it is that Mrs. Armitage, who’s clearly an art history professor type, is now wearing a studded leather collar bequeathed to her by the gang sexpot, Lulu. But kids don’t really know what a motorcycle gang is, or why it’s supposed to be funny, or why Lulu would have a studded collar and a bare midriff. But it does encourage a sort of faux sophistication in the child that in turn elicits beaming pride from the parent.
My kids didn’t get it at all. It was met with blank silence and requests for another story – they felt cheated and I was embarrassed. Nothing like a child for effortlessly calling out phoniness.
I think many of these books are written to épater self-conscious hipster parents, with very little time on their hands, who worry about the traditional character of the old children’s classics. I am incredulous that there are parents who cuddle their children at the end of a long day over The Storm Whale or Mrs. Armitage Queen of the Road. In any case, neither of my kids has ever requested either book after the initial time. I imagine that these are books for people looking for “new kids’ books”, because they are wary about the old ones and their repressions or their oppressions. There is no moral in these books unless it’s something performative and faddish, like liberating the whale you caught. Quirkiness is obligatory. Interestingly, these newer children’s books are very uncomplicated, compared to some of the complexities explored in A Bargain for Frances, in which Frances the badger tells Thelma her treacherous friend, “Do you want to be careful or do you want to be friends?” Or Rosemary Wells’ board books about Max getting the advantage over his bossy sister Ruby or Ira who hesitates to bring his teddy bear to a sleepover for fear of being ridiculed by his best friend, who ends up having a teddy bear himself. Children don’t need to think about motorcycle gangs or liberating captive whales. We are overthinking this.
Published in Education
I was 8 years old, fourth grade in Mrs. Smith class, in the school library looking for a book to check out. Browsing in the “children’s” section I see a book cover of animated animals.
“Oh, cool. This looks interesting.”
It was Animal Farm.
Scared… the… hell out of Me. I’ll never forget it.
And then they think it’s a matter of chance whether your kid likes to read or not! “Weirdly, Junior isn’t that into books….” Further along the road they pay 400 bucks/hr for SAT tutoring.
Yeah, but it was a good kind of fear clearly. That’s why today you’re on Ricochet.;)
Spot on. And while we are on the subject of children’s lit, let me add my least favorite “old-school” book, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Off the real subject here, of course, but I never pass up an opportunity to revile The Giving Tree.
Long ago, when my kids were in middle and high school, they were given summer reading lists. Nearly half of these books dealt with death. And then the smart people wondered at the increase in teen suicide. Sheesh.
Ah yes. Had this list not included Smoky Night, I would have demanded its inclusion. Smoky Night is a Caldecott Award Winner about inner-city riots that offers no comfort, no reassurance, presents a riot as just a thing that randomly happens at random times, which only instills in children the fear that this might happen where you live! I hate this book with a red-hot fury.
“Noi” must be short for “Annoi”. . . ing.
I enjoyed your post. I’d forgotten about Max and Ruby. My kids are 21 and 18, so we squeaked under the PC-Woke wire and still had fun things to read together.
I agree. I really hate that book, too. The Selfish Boy and his Co-dependent Tree.
I think the reasoning in the past was that the books that teenagers choose for themselves were too frivolous (you know, “mindless pap” like Tolkien and Heinlein and Steven King and Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet, etc etc) so they felt they had to assign “serious” books so the kids would get a balance of different literary experiences.
Since most teenagers today do not voluntarily read any books, I wonder if the reasoning behind assigned readings has changed at all. Probably not. It’s probably all books that the Woke pedagogues imagine are “good for them”.
Sounds like Greek tragedy.
My kids are all in college now. But I can still recite “Goodnight Moon” from memory.
At bedtime, each kid got to go to the bookcase and pick out a book. They picked that one over and over again.
So we’d read it again.
“In the great green room…”
I still have Duck in a Truck memorized. It came up just this week because my wife was on the phone recommending books to a friend who has a kid in the right age range.
For somewhat older kids, there are several I’ve been trying to get my kids to read. The Alvin Fernald series, The Great Brain books, even the Dr. Doolittle books.
I read Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and Hardy Boys back in the late 1960s. Even back then, I had the advantage of finding some of the older editions from the 20’s and 30’s and could see they were superior to the 60s (blue cover) editions. I’d probably be horrified by the revisions they’ve made in the current releases.
My experience, too. We also had fun finding the mouse.
This is why I have amassed a collection of children’s books from the American Heritage Library for my grandson. Found most of them on Amazon.
History written before SJW and Wokeness.
Just a sample.
I hate this book:
Not for any social commentary, it’s just really bad.
I loved the Babar books, as well as Madeleine. Read them all, and gave to my niece, and grand-niece.
Did you hear about the CW network’s woke-ification of the Nancy Drew story? Is nothing sacred?
My kids are in their early teens now but the book that bothered me when they were younger was Rainbow Fish. Visually, it was a good looking book with sparkly fish scales and such. The story, however, was that rainbow fish was better looking than the other fish so they wouldn’t be his friend. In order to make friends he needed to rip off body parts, his sparkly scales, and give them to the other fish. Then they played with him. Buying friends by giving away body parts didn’t sound like such a great message to me.
This is my a sceenshot of my audible.
That book reminds me of the baby classic Love You Forever. In the beginning you might think it’s ok, but by the end, “Why oh why are they continuing this pattern?”
I actually like Love You Forever. Yeah, it was silly and rather creepy by the end, but I loved the overall message: You’re my child, and I’ll always love you. The Giving Tree and its message? Not so much.
For my kids, it was Where the Wild Things Are.
”The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another…”
Thats just an update on the star-belly sneetches, isn’t it?
Not really. The Sneetches learn that they’re all really alike – that the stars really don’t define who they are as people and don’t make one better than the other. The Rainbow Fish learns that he’s happier sharing his “prized possessions” (his shiny scales) than keeping them all to himself.
Here are videos of the books being read in case anyone wants to check them out and see for themselves.
The Rainbow Fish
The Sneetches
Let’s see if I can quote this from memory:
That, from one of the Frances books, is among the most brilliant and true-to-life passages in a children’s book that I know of. It perfectly captures the logic of a child in a way that parents and children alike will recognize, and it’s really funny. My parents read these books to my sister and me, and we’ve read them to our children.
Most newer children’s books annoy me, too. “Twee” probably captures the spirit of many of them, when they’re not overtly pushing a cause.
My dad kept reading to me later than most would, because he switched to reading grown-up books that were a little tough for a grade-school kid, even one one who loved reading all the science books in the children’s section and even plowing through encyclopedias.
A good children’s book should be fun – if it has a moral, it should be basic and fundamental. If you want to do “liberal” messages, you start with stuff like “Being different is okay” not these preachy books.
We need an updated edition of The Sneetches where the star-bellied Sneetches destroy Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s machine, make the plain-bellied Sneetches kneel before them, and then demand reparations. Because this equality thing has fallen out of fashion.
They really are. We have several of them. Perhaps my favorite is the Inception-like We Are In A Book.
Lol! My mom was always super negative about Silverstein. 😊
Oh Frances! 🙏🏻 How we loved Frances as kids and my kids still love her, and Gloria and Albert 🥰