Well, you have a point, although I don’t think that’s necessarily a reason to like the book. Also, I think the lesson may be just a bit over the heads of the target audience (I’m thinking ~ 4 year olds here) – or maybe that’s just because of the way it was presented to me, and it was the adults who got wooshed. It was always presented to me (by teachers, etc.) as a beloved classic tale of unconditional love, with no recognition or discussion of the tragedy in the story. Just a “The End. Gee, wasn’t that a nice story? And next we have…” So it just left me feeling disturbed.
But you’re right, the book does contain a valuable lesson, and one children (and all people) would do well by learning (from both perspectives – the boy’s and the tree’s). I’m just not sure that the message comes across that blatantly to young children without addressing the meaning behind the story afterwards. E.g. “Was the boy nice to the tree? What could he have done differently?” And other similar lines of questioning that would lead the children to a moral conclusion. I mean, as I child I found it disturbing, and felt terrible injustice on behalf of the tree, but I lacked the sophistication to see it as a cautionary tale of taking love for granted, or letting oneself be used that way. (Whether it’s parental love or otherwise – honestly, I don’t think I began to realize parental sacrifice before I was getting towards my teens, and didn’t have a true understanding until I became a parent, and I’m not sure that many 4 year olds do. Given the sentiment in this thread towards the book, I rather doubt it.)
Mr. Popper’s Penguins is a quality children’s book in some respects. It has humor, the character of Mr. Popper has the traits and quirks of a real person and it’s paced correctly. But…
He paints the penguins! Mr. Popper writes on the penguins’ bodies with white paint!
When I was six years old, this distrubed me very deeply.
After that I forgot the book entirely for a long time. Then in seventh grade we had open ended reading assignments, where you had to read a certain number of pages each week. Someone in my class was reading Mr. Popper’s Penguins and I had to write a response to his critique of the book. This brought back all the bad memories in a rush.
I am going to have to second the Watership Down comment. That is quite possibly the worst book you could ever give to a child, short of Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty series. I was afraid of bunnies for years after watching the childrens movie (by force at my daycare center no less.) I did also manage to get ahold of a copy of The Brother’s Grimm version of Cinderella, and let me tell you, they could have used a singing mouse or two to make that story a little less upsetting.
Also, The Matchbook Girl story made me really sad and I didn’t understand why anyone would write a story like that.
Fair point; it’s definitely a book to talk with kids about, because it contains a huge and difficult lesson, placed in good terms. I do think it’s possible that a lot of adults miss the point of it (e.g., the dumbass in my class who wanted to use it to teach forestry), but it sounds to me as though most kids at least have an inkling of what it’s about.
I kinda wonder whether Silverstein wrote it about his own mother after her death, as sort of a tribute to her love and a horror at his ungratefulness. That’s just wild speculation, though.
And Watership Down is a fantastic book, but it is NOT a book for young children.
Watership Down is a great book, and everyone should read it…when they’re old enough. It irritates me that anyone would say, “Oh, an animated movie…here ya go, Junior” without having any idea what it was.
ITR champion, Mr. Popper loved those birds. I’m sure he read the labels on the house paint very carefully to make sure it was non-toxic before he numbered Columbus, Isabella, Jenny, Nelson, etc. Not to mention making sure that they were clean, dry, free of rust, and properly sanded.
I hated Charlotte’s Web. More specifically, I hated Wilbur. Here is Charlotte, who has been his friend and mentor, and quite literally saved his bacon, and he gets on his high horse about how awful it is for her to kill and eat insects. Judgemental little pig bastard.
I find that I only like it if I look at it as a very straight-told but secretly subversive tale that’s not meant to be taken seriously at all, rather like his Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book, which contains such words of wisdom as “Mommy loves the baby more than she loves you,” the tale of woe of your daddy who needs a nice haircut but he doesn’t have enough money to get one and where are those scissors anyway?, and -
I suspect it wasn’t his intention at all, but in light of the book I cited, I can stomach The Giving Tree if I think of it as a parody rather than intended to be taken at face value.
Heh–that’s a pretty great take on it, too. ABZ is my favorite Silverstein book, hands down (the guy in the ceiling who loves eggs is probably my favorite bit from it, too).
The Giving Tree is a very upsetting book, though I think Silverstein knew what he was doing.
I was infuriated by The Velveteen Rabbit for years and now can’t remember what made me so furious. And I’m a little scared to read it to find out.
I hated Raggedy Ann and Andy. There was a Christmas special on TV and my mother saw me watching it (I was bored) and got me a Raggedy Ann (which I hated) and a book (which I colored on). Bleah.
I liked the Berenstein Bears books. The bear I never liked is Winnie the Pooh. I just never read any of the stories and never watched any of the Disney animated things… except for one segment in Disney’s Halloween Treat, which featured Pooh’s weird-ass acid trip. The elephants? Does anyone know what I’m talking about? beWARE… beWARE… beWARE…
I think your problem with The Velveteen Rabbit is that the rabbit was great friends with the boy but then the boy got sick so the rabbit was taken away to be burned. That’s what got me anyway.
I hated anything cute or gooey. The Disney adaptations of Grimm and other works enraged me. I still won’t go to Disney theme parks because their book adaptations so disgusted me even as a small child.
I didn’t have those books at home but I did become familiar with them whenever I went to a doctor’s or dentist’s office. For years I was under the impression that when someone got his medical license, he was also given copies of the Uncle Arthur books.
BTW, did you ever read the volume of latter-day stories? I recall they seemed to feature an inordinate number of dying children or parents.
He was a Seventh Day Adventist? I never got that impression from the books. The stories never seemed to have any mention of avoiding meat or going to church on Saturday.
Enid Blyton especially the “Secret” series.
I stopped reading them when I realised that not only were the girls really dim, they were also given the crap bedroom, had to stay in and do chores while the boys enjoyed themselves, and only seemed to be there in order to be rescued by some male.
Oh, and the fact that “The Secret Mountain” is probably the most racist children’s book EVER, unless you count those two brothers who went on adventures to collect animals for zoos. Their take on Rwanda- tall, beautiful, civilised Tutsis, and the docile, backwards, pygmy Hutus who enjoyed serving their Tutsi masters still haunts me. If anyone knows about the books I mean (I think they had titles like “Artic Adventure”, “Amazon Adventure”"etc and there was a whole series) please let me know.
We also had a big book of 365 German fairytales, badly translated to English. Every other story seemed to involve cannabalism, incest, satanism or mass murder. One story consisted entirely of how Hans the woodcutter met the devil in the woods one day and agreed to give Satan his wife in exchange for a cow. He did. The cow died. The end.
This is often an issue in children’s entertainment.
That’s why I think the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon is such a work of genius, because there is in fact, nothing dumber than a sea sponge, and therefore, no argument to be had on this matter.
Friends unfamiliar with the series to whom I mention this viewpoint always bring up starfish, which is why I love that fact that SBSP’s best friend, at least as stupid, is one. Genius, I tell you.
As for children’s literature, I was apparently so successful at avoiding books I sensed I wouldn’t like or got a couple of pages into and retched at, that I can’t even remember their names. This thread is mostly bringing up memories of the dozens of books I read as a child that I LOVED…
I can’t say I hate The Giving Tree per se on its own merits, because encountering Shel Silverstein in any form, whethering it’s writing drug poem epics or perverting our nation’s youth, has, even since childhood, left me with a feeling I did not know how to describe until I splashed tar on my exposed leg while resurfacing my driveway a couple of years back. That kind of feeling.
And put me down for those horrible biographies of famous people. The late, lamented Spy Magazine once did a short article comparing newly published adult-level biographies with their child-level counterparts, showing not only historical revisionism, but invented personality traits, as well.
Stan:Dude, what the fuck is wrong with German people?
Was the German fairy tale book actually meant for children or was it a scholarly compilation of German folklore aimed at more mature readers? In any case, judging from your description, it doesn’t really sound like a book suitable for young children.
