In one of Ron Roy’s A to Z Mysteries, (for 2nd-4th graders), three kids around age nine who are home alone open the door to a stranger. He tells them he’s looking for his puppy. They go help him search for it. I couldn’t find which one this was on Wikipedia.
Then there’s White House Whiteout, by the same author, in which the President’s kids climb into a strange truck (along with the A to Z Mysteries kids) for some reason I’ve forgotten, and some villains drive them off the White House grounds.
For an unintended odd message of it’s own…Sylvester McMonkey McBean is one of my childhood heroes. I loved his style—“If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”
There are so many moments of unintentional hilarity in the early Boxcar books (I think she wrote 1-19). My favorite is the one where they go spend some weeks on a remote island, decide to go fishing, and realize they don’t have enough gear for everyone. “It’s okay,” says Grandfather. “You girls just sit on the rocks and watch.” Problem solved!
I’m still trying to figure out what the point of Bluebeard is. Any moral you try to give it is warped to crap by the rest of the story. Most places give it as “curiosity leads to regrets” but, I mean, her husband was a SERIAL KILLER – there is no message about trust in a relationship you can make with that premise. I don’t care if he would have wuved her fowever if she hadn’t looked. I swear though, that story has been the basis for numerous creepypasta (though usually it’s an old laptop or something instead of a closet nowadays – and the spouse is normal looking and wonderful until they find out you saw the footage). Maybe not intentionally, but it has pretty much the same premise.
Not really for children so much as for adults, though. Children don’t need to imbibe such adultish romanticization of childhood, I’m afraid (and I was pretty deeply into that sort of whimsy as a kid).
The Socks book I had was about a kitten that was taken home by a wonderful young couple who treated him like a pampered prince until the wife got pregnant. One day during a bunch of chaos, he nipped the wife on the ankle, and was thrown out into the cold rain. It went downhill from there and just broke my heart as a kid.
The second Boxcar children book disturbed me more than the first. If you’re rich, and your grandfather has his own island that you can live on for a while with your siblings, it’s fun to pretend you’re poor again!
The best theory I’ve heard is that it’s a story that embodies the fears of nervous brides of Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. These are girls who are going into arranged marriages, often with strangers, who will be leaving their homes to go be a subordinate in their husband’s home. The storyteller might be saying, essentially, “You’re afraid your husband might be a brute? Well, good, because he might be! Don’t screw around with him, girl, because you might DIE!”
If you read it as a horror story told in this context, it makes a lot of sense.
A relative gave my preschool kid a book called the "Thingumajig Book of Manners, featuring filthy large-nosed, dark-haired characters in what looks like Continental European clothing of maybe two hundred years ago. They are depicted as ill-mannered, inconsiderate and having bad hygiene, and at the bottom of every page two apple-cheeked, golden haired tots comment how they will never act like those disgusting Thingumajigs. Maybe I was overthinking it, but with different captions it sure looked to me like it could passed for another type of book.
Ignoring the image of John Carpenter’s Thing in that article, in the story line described as “Eventually he is bitten by a dog, who goes on to eat the boy’s sausage while he is bedridden”, is it a sausage sausage the dog eats, or a “boy can’t move his pillow to protect his groin” sausage?
I once worked at Houghton Mifflin’s children division. The Pinkneys (father-son, Afr-Amer illustrators of numerous, gorgeous, award-winning books for kids) had been invited to speak to us in an hour seminar.
HM offices are in Boston, Copley Square, right over FAO Schwarz. In an eye-catching front window display, Schwarz had showcased the Curious George books–they are HM Children’s flagship publications.
And that day, when Brian Pinkney decided to abandon his notes and address the Curious George series, its genesis and development, you could have heard a pin drop. For an hour.
The first critique that has had negative implications for Curious George comes from a literary criticism approach to the text which analyzes the text as a potential post-colonial representation of a slave-capture narrative. In this reading, George’s capture and removal from his happy home in Africa by the visiting (and white) Man in the Yellow Hat, and subsequent travel to the U.S. to ultimately reside (in captivity) at the zoo parallels the invasion of the continent by Europeans who captured inhabitants for the slave trade. An example of this line of argument and introduction to some key sources in this area of literary study can be found in June Cummins’ article, “The Resisting Monkey: ‘Curious George,’ Slave Captivity Narratives, and the Postcolonial Condition.” Those who follow this line of reasoning, whether in whole or in part, naturally develop some reservations about whether they want to ‘provide such an example’ of historical behavior to the child readers under their care, and therefore make an argument that, while other stories involving the monkey George might not be objectionable, the original book is too oblivious to its own potential to offend to be an acceptable entertainment for children.
Ah, I realize I’m all alone on the far end of the bench. But, nonetheless, I’ll go ahead and say it. I find The Cat in the Hat objectionable. Let’s see, the kids are home alone, bored, so they invite a stranger in, make a mess of the house, stranger magically cleans it up, and then they wonder if they should tell mom about it. And there’s the sex-role stereotyping of the boy and girl. I love the clever rhymes and it was so innovative and new when I was a kid. But it still bugs me…
The Point is an evil story. Evil because it’s true.
In this story people have pointy heads. Not just pointy heads, but “pointy” is the design concept behind every living thing and every man made object.
One day a boy is born with a round head. They make him wear a pointy hat but after a while, that’s not good enough. They tell him to get the fuck out of town. We don’t want you in here you freak.
So the boy wanders the earth like Kane or Jules. After many travels he comes home and he takes off his hat and miracle of miracles, his head has grown into a pointy shape. You think, they might accept him back into society. Do they? DO THEY? FUCK NO! Everybody’s heads suddenly turn rounded. All the buildings change to rounded shapes. The entire society still rejects the boy. Fuck him. Once a freak, ALWAYS A FREAK!
