Kids books can really be kind of dark. Like unexpectedly bleak when you are not a kid. Grown-ups forget that childhood stories are terrifying, I think. But then they write stories that are terrifying for children to read during childhood and then the children grow up into adults and some of them make children who read books meant for childhood and suddenly remember that the landscape of year 6 is a mine field of facts and truths and change and unpredictability and Things That Are Important that are not a teddy bear, or pizza or the smell of grass on a summer's day.
Odd things happen to grown-ups. They are strange. Unkind. Thoughtless. Vengeful. They tell bad jokes and laugh at them with nothing like delight or glee. Their stories are a litany of the same variation on the same set of themes with the same lead characters and the same untimely deaths. They call the stories funny even when there is nothing to laugh at.
I read to a group of 8 year olds today. 8 year olds are a hard and unforgiving audience. I read to them the first few chapters of
Hamster Princess by Ursula Vernon. It is about what happens to a hamster princess named Harriet when she learns that she is cursed to prick her paw on a hamster wheel on her 12th birthday and fall into a deep sleep from which she will be awakened by the kiss of a prince. Spoiler: she decides that since she has to be alive for the curse to work, she is invincible, so goes off on her riding quail Mumfrey and slays and hacks and fights and jumps to heart's content. I mean, for a little while. Until it's time for the curse to take effect and all.
The 8 year olds cared not. I could feel them not caring.
The next thing I read to them was the first couple of chapters of
Ollie's Odyssey by William Joyce. The first thing that happens is that a child is born with a hole in his heart and his parents are almost drowning in fear. They cope in different ways. The mother of the child makes a toy and the toy (Ollie of the title) becomes aware. Somewhere in the hospital hallways, as the newborn child clutched the ear of the funny little toy, something happened to the toy and then something changed in the room where I read and those children paid attention.
They cared. I felt them caring. Not about the baby with the hole in his heart. About Ollie. Ollie, whose future I fear will hold loneliness, fear, courage and a stick.
