Children's Literature

Greenhaven Press Companion to Literary Movements and Genres

by Wendy Mass (Editor)

Contains a series of essays discussing children's literature, the early years, series books, common themes, and controversy.

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Wendy Mass is the author of thirty novels for young people, including A Mango-Shaped Space, which was awarded the Schneider Family Book Award, Leap Day, the Twice Upon a Time fairy tale series, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall, the Willow Falls, Space Taxi and Candymakers series. Wendy wrote the storyline for an episode of the television show Monk, entitled "Mr. Monk Goes to the Theatre," which aired during the show's second season. She tells people her hobbies are hiking and photography, but really they're collecting candy bar wrappers and searching for buried treasure with her metal detector. Wendy lives with her family in New Jersey.

Reviews

[Kaleb Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a shame Goodreads doesn't have a cover for this book, because I really do like the cover I picked up.

I picked up this book for an essay on the dearest Brother's Grimm, but ended up continuing the book because I was interested in the history of literature in America and so I stuck with it. This collection of essays are informative, varying, and keep me interested with plenty of quotes, images, and the content of the essays themselves.

Some of them were a typical amount of boring, but C.S. Lewis, Alison Lurie, Roderick McGillis, and James S. Jacobs/Michael O. Tunnell had brilliant essays on Writing Styles, Children's Horror, Subversions, and the importance of multiculturalism. I did feel like there were too many examples in some of these essays. Like they droned on and on... I don't need 20 examples to prove your point.

There was one essay that made points that frankly... annoyed me. Stefan Kanfer writes about the growing amount of books being written for girls over boys. He states that this lack of literature causes men to fail out of school, to require special-ed courses, and even kill themselves. I can think of many different reasons for this, instead of a lack of literature, especially in 2001, where they have already plenty of American Novels aimed at young boys. Boys do not require facts anymore than feelings, and there is certainly nothing wrong with a boy doing something not traditional, like ballet.