On Irony and the 4-year-old

I witnessed an interesting literary controversy recently in the different reactions of my two daughters, aged 8 and 4, to Jon Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.

For those who don't know this book, it's a collection of cynically absurdist retold fairy-tales in which, for example, the Very Ugly Duckling grows up to become a Very Ugly Duck, and the Gingerbread Man is made of stinky cheese, and no-one tries to eat him because he smells disgusting.

I originally got this book out of the library for my 4-year-old, because it looks like a picture book, it's shelved in the picture book section, and picture books are for children aged 3-5, right? In this case, wrong.

As I discovered, a fairy-tale is to a four-year-old as the Bible is to a fundamentalist Christian. It is an Authoritative Text. You do not mess with it. You do not change it. You do not mock it. You do not subvert it. It is, in a word, sacred. When I tried to read the stories in this book to my four-year-old, she refused to listen. She protested loudly, and if you've ever heard a four-year-old protest loudly, you know how bad it can be.

My eight-year-old, however, picked up the book and read it on her own. She devoured it with the same relish as the sly old fox devoured the gingerbread man. She was tickled at the idea of undermining the received wisdom of the fairy tales, of questioning the authority of the Authoritative Text. Irony -- she got it.

It would be interesting to study the development of a sense of irony in children. (Master's psychology thesis, anyone?). But what's interesting to me, as an author, is that despite our post-modern propensity for subversion, a picture book that relies on irony (although it may win awards) is not likely to be a hit with the traditional, 3-to-5-year-old picture book audience.

But perhaps that's a good thing. After all, isn't it nice to know that there's still room in the heart of a four-year-old for an ugly duckling who grows up to be a swan?