Rediscovering Kids’ Books

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Midway through life’s journey, many of us find ourselves returning to a realm that we had left ages ago and may not have thought about much since. That country is the land of children’s literature, a place as vivid, varied and tumultuous as any that ever existed on a real map. When we’re young, if we’re lucky, we spend lots of time with its scenes and characters: Hansel and Gretel nibbling the witch’s candy house; Max sailing “in and out of weeks” to where the Wild Things are; Charlotte weaving the word “radiant” into her web to save Wilbur, the pig; Lucy stepping into a wardrobe and emerging in snowy Narnia. The world of children’s literature is rich and enchanting and formative, but by the time most of us reach late adolescence we’re out of it. We put away childish things, as it were, and get busy with the fascinations and requirements of adulthood.

So it can be surprising and thrilling, and disconcerting too, to get a return ticket when our own children come into the world. Having given only an occasional nostalgic thought to Oz or Neverland or the Hundred Acre Wood, we’re plunged back into the joyful scrum. As to the sensations of re-entry and the unexpected complexities that grown-ups may find in the books they loved when they were small—well, that is the stuff of “Wild Things,” a charming, discursive encounter with classic children’s literature from the perspective of a parent.

Our Virgil, on this journey, is both guide and wanderer. Bruce Handy is a widely published essayist and critic and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. With his wife, Helen, he has two children, and it was while reading bedtime stories to Zoë and Isaac that the author felt he was “revisiting a favorite old neighborhood after many years and finding not only that it hadn’t been chain-stored into submission or paved over altogether, but that it was far more interesting and complex than I knew.”

For parents who are embarking on this phase of rediscovery, for those in the thick of it, and for those for whom it is a warm and recent memory, “Wild Things” will be a delightful excursion. Mr. Handy writes with zip, sincerity and good humor. He has a gift for witty phrasing: Fairy tales have a “rude verve,” and in their number is one so ghastly that it lurks “like a moldy berry” in the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm.

The book is organized in a way that approximates the developmental stages of a growing child. We start with the ur-baby book, “Goodnight Moon,” whose author, Margaret Wise Brown, Mr. Handy discovers, was not “a kindly gray-haired woman with an ample lap” but a glamorous hottie with amazing talent. He goes on to tackle the picture books and life stories of Maurice Sendak, Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss ) and Beatrix Potter before progressing to C.S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott —all the time giving his personal responses. Mr. Handy is an atheist but confesses himself “charmed and persuaded by the religious undercurrent of [C.S.] Lewis’s [“Narnia”] tales—in the sense that I am moved and persuaded not by the theology itself but rather by Lewis’s ability to convey in tangible, organic terms what his religion means to him, what Christianity feels like for him.” All the same, Mr. Handy’s heart, I think, belongs to Beverly Cleary (born in 1916 and thus 101 today) and E.B. White (1899-1985).

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire) Here’s a link to Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult