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Why Children's Books?

Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment....

I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuce; but then I am not a rabbit.’ My hope would be that children, in reading books that do not defer to their youth in terms of vocabulary, will come to find in language an ally against those who would commandeer erudition in order to dominate. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love and lose your moneys to a monster, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, in Letters from Prison, three years into being jailed for his criticism of Mussolini’s fascist state: ‘I am a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.’ There’s a willed optimism inherent in the act of writing for children.

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