It has been repeatedly stated that children’s literature plays a specific role in totalitarian countries, because dictators don’t read children’s books and don’t think children’s books are important enough to bother with. Fortunately, dictators are wrong. Children’s books are incendiary stuff; they are liberating, they mold young minds, they teach children to think independently, to question, to investigate, just as Milo learns to do during his travels. In a country where at least a thousand writers paid for their words with their lives and many more with their freedom, how essential it was
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