This is a re-post from July 2021 (seems like yesterday). I left it as originally written but I’ll add a bit. I was skimming through The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (Victor Watson, ed., Cambridge University Press 2001) yesterday and read the entry on Randall Jarrell (1914-1965). Jarrell was a brilliant poet–he was what we now call a Poet Laureate of the United States. His first work for children was a translation of Grimm Brothers (1962). Note the date–he didn’t begin writing for kids until what would be the end of his life. All but the first of his four children’s books were illustrated by Maurice Sendak. This is what the Cambridge Guide has to say about The Bat-Poet:

The Bat-Poet (1964) explores the family romance in terms of poet and audience, showing the reader (better than any textbook) what poems and poets are like. Sendak’s cross-hatched marginal drawings of bats and his evocative double-page spreads are themselves visual poetry.

page 393

Next, I see that I commented negatively on a popular contemporary children’s book. You’re not supposed to do that for fear of offending kids and parents who like that book because you’re putting off potential readers of your book. So to be clear, my critical opinion of the book is that it is terrible. It’s filled with ungrammatical writing. It has a lot (as in many many) discordances–events in the story just don’t follow. The kids tell each other to shut up and such, and Mom is really mean and plays favorites.

I feel as if I’ve written all this before. In any case, just wanted to be clear. In my opinion, it is not the sort of book kids should be reading.

If you’d like to read a book in which the characters treat one another with kindness, are helpful, and the story is fun and uplifting, I recommend Miss Missy’s School: A Pack of Farm Dogs Starts a School by me.

Finally–I LOLed when I read my last sentence: Highly recommend The Bat-Poet. I’m not a kid, but I fell in love with it. I didn’t even know what “low-concept” stories were when I wrote that!

And now to July 2021.

The Bat Poet

Randall Jarrell. Maurice Sendak, illus. Harper Collins, New York. 1964. (reprinted, 1992)

They just don’t write ’em like this anymore. Or if they do, I haven’t found them and that’s too bad.

As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of my life in the last year or so looking at children’s literature. Contemporary kid lit is junk food. I say this as someone who has no problem indulging in a bag of Lays plain potato chips washed down with a can of soda; as someone who’s go-to mid-afternoon snack in the winter is old fashioned Kraft mac & cheese; as someone who just adores Swanson’s chicken á la king from a can.

But I guarantee (said in your best Justin Wilson voice) that I eat better than that 95% of the time. Well, 90%. I’ve been on a chip binge lately. I think it’s the salt.

A steady diet of junk makes you fat and stupid. Likewise, a steady diet of, for example, The Spiderwick Chronicles is bound to make kids… well, fat and stupid to start, and then we’ll tack on mean, unimaginative, ungrammatical, and unread.

Highly recommend The Bat-Poet. I’m not a kid, but I fell in love with it.