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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
Here’s another vote for Frances. I love to reread them and laugh. I’ll be reading them to my kid(s) before long.
I have a book in mind to write, but I need to find the source material in another book that is hiding somewhere on a bookshelf, or maybe in a stack around the house. We live surrounded by piles of books.
Be sure to put the Little House series on your list (but you knew that 😁).
No drag queen story hours at our branch yet! But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. Maybe that can be our first big program to celebrate reopening after closing due to coronavirus. I’ll be sure to suggest it at the next staff meeting!
I understand the distinction you’re making, and you’re correct to an extent. But the lines are getting veeeery blurry.
I fear it’s only a matter of time here, too. We have a lot more drag queens in Our Fair City than I imagined. (At least, that’s how it appears according to the calendar of events in our local arts rag. More drag events than I ever expected.)
So . . . what’s the best approach to telling my local library that they had better not be letting the merest thought of Drag Queen Story Hour entertain the slightest possibility of crossing their minds. How can I, as a conservative, get the point across without coming off as a conservative crank? I’ll note that the library is looking to do a huge expansion project, which I assume means public funding (and I hope, a referendum on the ballot). How can I say “You bring in the drag queens, I agitate for defunding your project”?
EDIT: I do think that Our Fair City still retains enough conservatism that if they try it, they will face a huge pushback. But the ground is shifting so rapidly.
Hi @drewinwisconsin – I don’t want to hijack the thread but here’s a quick two cents: communicate with both the library system higher-ups and the library’s board of trustees. Be complimentary about the library’s contributions to the community. Make positive suggestions (“one idea my daughter came up with for a library program was to do a tween graphic novel club where everyone dresses up as a favorite character!”) rather than only being against something. Be friendly and polite rather than aggressive and confrontational. Feel free to send me a PM if you’d like to chat more about it!
You MUST do it! Soon I will do a post about the splash I made in my library and never will I set foot there again. I prefer to fund Jeff Bezos’ yacht.
As an ex-lefty who speaks that language fluently, sadly, I don’t think conservatives are “cranks”. I think they diverse, tolerant, courageous, rebellious & subversive. (This is the left’s fault for massively overplaying their hand). Why the left, controlling everything, still manages to get young people by playing underdog beats me.
Because you won’t or you can’t. ; )
Won’t. Because I can’t. It’s a private American library here in Paris, France. We decided to stop paying dues. Because they are WOKE. And I won’t subsidize wokeness. So we pay for Amazon instead.
I wear white New Balance 623’s. Are they cool?
Take the books your parents read to you. They probably saved them.
Reminds me of Powell’s books in Portland Oregon. Apparently, every department has to celebrate LGBTQ+ people of color. However, people of color don’t mean Asians or Asian-Americans but black and brown people. This is odd because Portland has way more Asians than NAM (non-Asian minorities). I still liked the bookstore though.
You might wish to check out Book Depository for your books. They are a UK company that offers free shipping to the US and I buy my British editions of the Harry Potter books from them.
I think they are connected to Abebooks? I feel like I have heard the name and gotten books from them more than a few times!
We loved the Froggy books and Knuffle Bunny. Pigeon ones, not so much! We also liked the Piggy and Elephant books.
I hate that book! We read it once and decided it wasn’t worth it. Keep in mind, my husband taught elementary school for eighteen years.
My favorite is Bread and Jam for Francis.
Kid(s)? I just checked your profile. Congratulations on the new addition to your family!
Oh YES!
So strange. I have seen that one. Didn’t gravitate to it. I had no idea the message was so horrible!
Funny: I am very leery about “rainbow” stuff in children’s books.
Not funny at all, given its modern-day symbolism.
Although I think when The Rainbow Fish was published (1992 — and it was a bit of a phenomenon), we hadn’t yet reached the point in society where rainbows were ubiquitously used to signal support of the alphabet people. If anything, we were still in an era where, if people associated it with anything political, it would have been Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
Have you heard of Harry Miller? Arrested in the UK for tweeting an allegedly anti-trans limerick? He said in a podcast that he is starting to see the rainbow flag as a kind of swastika. Also Peter Hichens compared it to the Soviet flags in the late days of the USSR: a way to intimidate dissenters.
Arrested?
Okay . . .
Even the reportage on this is disturbing as the BBC sees it important to interject its own “analysis” into a news story by helpfully reminding you of the “hate crimes” against trannies.
Notably, they do not define what these “hate crimes” are.
Until someone makes a distinction between Hate Crimes and Hurt Feelings I’m gonna declare the stats meaningless.
The only thing I’d ever seen of Silverstein’s as a kid was Where the Sidewalk Ends. The cover shows a kid peering over an overhanging ledge with a vast nothingness at the end of a sidewalk. As a country boy, it just made me roll my eyes at the city-slickeredness of the premise, and I wound up having a kind of prejudice against Silverstein’s poems from then on. For all I know, they might be pretty good, aside from The Giving Tree, but I’ve never bothered to find out.
They actually are pretty good.
They exude a sort of 1970s liberal intelligentsia vibe. But this can be ignored. There’s far worse out there (that said I have instinctive reserves about Silverstein, and Roald Dahl because my mom never liked them and therefore didn’t read them to me!)
I didn’t read them to my kids either.