kids’ books
In the summer, I often like to wax nostalgic by reading children’s literature, better known these days as YA (that’s shorthand for “young adult”) fiction. Sometimes I pick stuff that was marketed to preteens when I was in elementary school, such as Dicey’s Song. This summer it’s been classics of the genre, including Anne of Green Gables and The Railway Children.
What I’m noticing this time around are both the idealistic goals of the books and their gritty realities. Anne of Green Gables, of course, is the plucky, chatty orphan adopted by mistake onto a farm on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Her backstory, glossed over in the book by Anne herself, is unrelievedly grim: parents dead of illness when Anne was a baby, abusive foster parents who put Anne to work as a skivvy and nanny, and no education to speak of. She doesn’t even have peers; her imagination instead finds solace in pretend friends, including one concocted out of her own reflection in a pane of glass.
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