# Which highly praised children’s books leave you cold? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 29, 2011, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396 "2011-03-29T17:08:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/81 "2011-04-02T01:01:13Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Princhester writes: > > \> She draws on her career as a teacher to write perceptively about the hopes > \> and fears of early teen characters. > > What career as a teacher? She didn’t teach that long, and most of her students were adults, as far as I can determine: > > [J. K. Rowling - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling) When she was teaching French in Scotland, I thought she was teaching teenagers. I would have to remember where I read that. ---
**Author:** ![xoferew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/e9a140/32.png) [@xoferew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xoferew)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/82 "2011-04-02T03:03:52Z")
> [@raspberry\_hunter](#): > > Anything by Eric Carle. My mom says I loved _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_ when I was a kid, but I think she is making this up (she has a famously poor memory where our childhoods are concerned). The pictures are crap, the stories are crap, and they don’t even make any sense. I don’t understand why this guy is still in print, much less well-regarded. > > Also, along the same lines, Goodnight Moon is pretty creepy. I loved this summary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by one of my preschoolers: “He got so beautiful from eating ALL THAT JUNK!” (I like Eric Carle though, and we do author studies on him in my class.) ---
**Author:** ![xoferew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/e9a140/32.png) [@xoferew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xoferew)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/83 "2011-04-02T03:07:06Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Ooh, **Artemis Fowl**. I really wanted to like it, but it was mediocre. > > Which reminds me–I don’t think **Harry Potter** has been mentioned yet. I’ve read the whole series, so it’s not that I despise them; they’re reasonably diverting. But I really don’t get the love for them. I’ve read so much children’s fantasy that I think is shit-tons better (including, incidentally, The Dark is Rising 🙂 ). I could never get into Harry Potter. As a teacher, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Where are the responsible adults?! What are they thinking letting kids do all this dangerous stuff?!” I remember liking The Dark is Rising though. ---
**Author:** ![xoferew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/e9a140/32.png) [@xoferew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xoferew)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/84 "2011-04-02T03:22:07Z")
> [@WhyNot](#): > > I wonder if that’s because parents can see it as “other” while children see it as, well, the way things are. Sort of a “can’t see the forest for the trees” thing. Sendak does a fairly good job of capturing that sort of imagination run wild and free thing (although I always thought the illustrations were too dark and washed out - literally, not figuratively - to match my imagination), but you don’t really appreciate that sort of liminal space until you’ve crossed into adulthood. Only with the hindsight of adulthood and responsibility do you truly understand and appreciate - and yearn for - the wild freedom of childhood terror. > > Or something. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Re: the darkness and terror in Sendak books, I once saw an exhibit about his children’s books at The Jewish Museum in NYC. One of the rooms was about how these kids in a concentration camp put on a play, I guess to keep them occupied, and then they were all killed and a new batch of kids would learn the lines and put on the costumes. Sendak wrote a kids’ book based on that play the doomed kids put on. I think the man was haunted by a lot of dark stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/85 "2011-04-02T03:47:16Z")
> [@well\_he\_s\_back](#): > > Left Hand of Dorkness said re J.K. Rowling/Harry Potter -“Whatever she did, it left me cold: I did not find her characters as compelling as other YA characters in other YA fiction” - EXACTLY. sometimes it feels I’m the only one in the world who feels this way. I’ve always found the HP books to be distinctly mediocre. Harry’s aunt and uncle and cousin are SO horrid, they have no redeeming features. Harry, though, is pure and virtuous and he is just a natural born ball player. Or at any rate, that’s how I read it. Harry didn’t DO anything to either deserve his complete misery, or to deserve his skill in playing ball. I read a lot of YA fiction, especially fantasy, and I kept comparing Rowling to authors like Diana Wynne Jones (RIP). ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/86 "2011-04-02T04:11:27Z")
Arnold Winkelried writes: \> When she was teaching French in Scotland, I thought she was teaching \> teenagers. Again, I’m sorry, but you’ve got her biography all mixed up. Look at the Wikipedia entry that I linked to. She never lived in Scotland before she moved there in December 1993. She didn’t do anything there except work on the first Harry Potter book (and take some courses that might have eventually given her a teaching certificate). She lived on welfare, on a grant from the Scottish Arts Council, and on an advance from the British publishers of the book. Later she got an advance from the American publishers of the book that solved her financial problems for the next couple of years. In any case, soon after that she was making enough from the royalties on the books to live comfortably. Her only teaching job was while living in Portugal where she taught English, mostly to adults. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/87 "2011-04-02T04:31:44Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Arnold Winkelried writes: > > \> When she was teaching French in Scotland, I thought she was teaching > \> teenagers. > > Again, I’m sorry, but you’ve got her biography all mixed up. Your mistake is relying too much on Wikipedia, which does not contain the sum total of human knowledge. You may have noticed the Wikipedia article saying that after she returned from Portugal, she needed an extra degree to teach in Scotland. What they don’t mention: When she returned to Scotland, she went back to school to get a teaching degree and was a “student teacher” at Leith Academy while she was in school. See here for more details: [The JK Rowling story](http://news.scotsman.com/jkrowlingharrypotter/The-JK-Rowling-story.2436228.jp) ([news.scotsman.com](http://news.scotsman.com)) Published Date: 16 June 2003, By Stephen McGinty For another cite you can look to the book _J.K. Rowling: a biography_ by Connie Ann Kirk. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/88 "2011-04-02T04:42:55Z")
So according to that news story she taught as a student teacher for some part of one academic year. That’s not much of a teaching career. She was never an ordinary paid teacher of teenagers. That news story isn’t completely accurate either. It repeats the story that she wrote in cafes because her flat wasn’t heated, which is inaccurate. It fails to mention that she was on welfare while in Edinburgh. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/89 "2011-04-02T04:55:00Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > So according to that news story she taught as a student teacher for some part of one academic year. That’s not much of a teaching career. She was never an ordinary paid teacher of teenagers. That news story isn’t completely accurate either. It repeats the story that she wrote in cafes because her flat wasn’t heated, which is inaccurate. It fails to mention that she was on welfare while in Edinburgh. Which news story? The one I linked to? Or are you referring to some other totally different one? You say “It fails to mention that she was on welfare” If you’re referring to my article, then you haven’t read it very carefully. A quote from the article at the link I provided: “A small flat at 28 Gardner’s Crescent was organised by social services. So began Rowling’s experience of government bureaucracy as she was forced to fill in endless forms and attend demeaning interviews in order to secure a weekly allowance of £69.” Also, you say “It repeats the story that she wrote in cafes because her flat wasn’t heated” Again, read the article, which says "Although never quite as bad as the press has painted in terms of poverty - she always had food and clothes, heat and light - Rowling did endure a deep depression brought about by circumstance and frustration. " About writing in the cafe, the article says “Rowling went to Nicolson’s either as a respite from a freezing flat or through a passion for good coffee, _depending on which version you believe_.” (italics mine) I never said she had a teaching career, I said she taught French in Scotland. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/90 "2011-04-02T05:19:33Z")
O.K., it does mention that she was on welfare. It still does say though: \> Rowling went to Nicolson’s either as a respite from a freezing flat or through a \> passion for good coffee . . . Rowling has made it clear that she never lived in an unheated flat. To claim that maybe that is true is just the writer of the news story being stupidly cute. It’s not a matter of which story to believe. It’s just wrong to claim that she lived in an unheated flat. And while you never said that she had a career as a teacher, Princhester did. Furthermore, I remember what student teachers did from my school days, and it’s not doing any large proportion of the teaching for a class. It’s possible that they do much more in Scotland that what they do here, but certainly if someone here claimed that they had once been a teacher when they had only been a student teacher, it would be like someone claiming that they had been a lawyer when they had only been a law clerk during a summer in law school. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/91 "2011-04-02T05:45:23Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Rowling has made it clear that she never lived in an unheated flat. To claim that maybe that is true is just the writer of the news story being stupidly cute. It’s not a matter of which story to believe. It’s just wrong to claim that she lived in an unheated flat. I’m not sure what your agenda is, but you’re wilfully ignoring the portion of the article, which I quoted, that specifically says that she did not live in an unheated flat. That article is fairly detailed and accurate as far as these short newspaper biographies of JK Rowling go. > [@](#): > > And while you never said that she had a career as a teacher, Princhester did. Furthermore, I remember what student teachers did from my school days, and it’s not doing any large proportion of the teaching for a class. It’s possible that they do much more in Scotland that what they do here, but certainly if someone here claimed that they had once been a teacher when they had only been a student teacher, it would be like someone claiming that they had been a lawyer when they had only been a law clerk during a summer in law school. I can’t speak for Princhester, but as long as we’re picking nits, she did do some amount of teaching to young people, so as far as that goes, his statement was closer to the truth than yours was. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/92 "2011-04-02T13:55:45Z")
Well, to derail a “JK Rowling’s CV” tangent… I’ll just say that I liked most of the books mentioned here. BUT, I wonder if that’s because I didn’t read them until I was out of college. So the Not Having Life Experiences wasn’t a problem. And I’d grown out of Needing To Be Cool, so that I could take a YA book to a coffee place. (side note: today it’s _The Case Of The Missing Chums_ and a latté) Sure, some pale in comparison to Great Lit. I’m with the poster who read Narnia after LOTR, but what fantasy _could_ stand up in that situation? I’m listening to TLTW+TW now, and was moved by the time I was done with the Dedication. :::: Must… resist… urge to convince readers how wonderful my favorite kids’ books are… :::: ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/93 "2011-04-02T15:57:05Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > Harry’s aunt and uncle and cousin are SO horrid, they have no redeeming features. Harry, though, is pure and virtuous and he is just a natural born ball player. Or at any rate, that’s how I read it. Harry didn’t DO anything to either deserve his complete misery, or to deserve his skill in playing ball. Harry has faults. He’s sometimes arrogant, sometimes self-pitying–both self-centered responses to the fact of being born or placed into circumstances beyond one’s control. He is redeemed not _by_ his unearned specialness, but by getting over it, and by friendship, his loyalty to and from others. As I suggested before, I don’t find Rowling’s writing itself, the actual construction of sentence and description and narrative, to be amazing. But I think she had some great concepts, and indeed some insight into teen character as **Princhester** said–whether it derives from any teaching experience or not. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2011, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/94 "2011-04-02T16:15:48Z")
Incidentally, the most important thing that I learned from that article that Arnold Winkelried links to is that J. K. Rowling was an abused wife during her first marriage. (I had assumed that the marriage broke up because he was cheating on her. This guy was apparently an enormous bastard. He was also a drug addict.) Since this was exactly the period when she was working out in her mind the basic plot of the first Harry Potter book, if you believe that the experiences of an author are useful to understanding her writings, this is something important to know. I’m astonished that none of the news stories I’ve read about her over the years mentioned this fact. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2011, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/95 "2011-04-03T00:21:24Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > \> Rowling went to Nicolson’s either as a respite from a freezing flat or through a > \> passion for good coffee . . . > > Rowling has made it clear that she never lived in an unheated flat. To claim that maybe that is true is just the writer of the news story being stupidly cute. There is no necessary contradiction or cuteness here. I think the key disjunct is your apparent assumption that a flat that has heating is necessarily not freezing. If you live on 69 pounds a week, the flat may be heated but still cold because you don’t want to run up heating bills by having the heating on all day while you work. It makes sense then to go to a coffee shop to get your heating on someone else’s dime. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2011, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/96 "2011-04-03T23:29:25Z")
> [@spark240](#): > > Harry has faults. He’s sometimes arrogant, sometimes self-pitying–both self-centered responses to the fact of being born or placed into circumstances beyond one’s control. He is redeemed not _by_ his unearned specialness, but by getting over it, and by friendship, his loyalty to and from others IIRC, his faults only really show up in the later books. In the first one, he’s a poor little boy who turns out, through an accident of birth, to be the best guy at magic, the best guy at sports, the inheritor of a fortune, and the foreordained savior of all humanity. Not exactly a nuanced portrait in the beginning. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2011, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/97 "2011-04-03T23:41:27Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > IIRC, his faults only really show up in the later books. In the first one, he’s a poor little boy who turns out, through an accident of birth, to be the best guy at magic, the best guy at sports, the inheritor of a fortune, and the foreordained savior of all humanity. Not exactly a nuanced portrait in the beginning. But you LIKED _The Dark is Rising_? ---
**Author:** ![Carmady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f04885/32.png) [@Carmady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carmady)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/98 "2011-04-04T00:11:42Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > IIRC, his faults only really show up in the later books. In the first one, he’s a poor little boy who turns out, through an accident of birth, to be the best guy at magic, the best guy at sports, the inheritor of a fortune, and the foreordained savior of all humanity. Not exactly a nuanced portrait in the beginning. Inheriting a fortune and being considered the “chosen one” are not really aspects of his character, are they? Indeed, the friction between his status as the “chosen one” and his ineptitude at magic is a major part of the books. Contrary to the impression you somehow got, he isn’t good at magic at all until the later books, and even then he only excels in very specific areas. He is miles below Hermione, the Weasley twins, and seemingly everyone from the previous generation. Making Harry kind of dumb and leaving the heavy thinking to Hermione was probably one of the smartest moves Rowling made. The obvious choice would have been to make Harry another prodigy, but what she did instead made him much more relatable. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/99 "2011-04-04T00:25:36Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#): > > But you LIKED _The Dark is Rising_? Will is foreordained, but he doesn’t have much character at all, I admit. Still I found that easier to deal with than Harry as a golden child. Seriously, **Carmady** , you think he was bad at magic? I thought he was far better at it than nearly everyone else, from the beginning, except in potions. He got his Patronus earlier than anyone else, and I thought there were other examples. Also he got the phat magical loot early on. ---
**Author:** ![california\_jobcase](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9d8465/32.png) [@california\_jobcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/california_jobcase)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-highly-praised-children-s-books-leave-you-cold/576396/100 "2011-04-04T00:32:24Z")
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