thebibliofiles - Review: Feeling Like a Kid

Review: Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children's Literature, by Jerry Grisowld
4/5

Felling Like a Kid is essentially a literary look at children’s psychology.  Griswold distills children’s literature into its 5 key component parts: snugness, scariness, smallness, lightness, and aliveness.  In each chapter, he pries apart the importance of these essences and what they mean to children.  He also distinguishes between the good and bad of each: while scariness is good, it’s only in jest and when we know where safety is.  He uses some of the best examples of children’s literature (and some examples of adult literature that has been commandeered by children’s lit, like Gulliver’s Travels) to demonstrate each concept.  Peter Pan is lightness, Pinocchio aliveness, the Borrowers smallness, and Struwwelpeter scariness.  Each example is clear and artfully expounded upon and stories from many cultures are woven together to show the common threads that exist in all children’s stories.  His book emphasizes the need for a separate class of literature--well-written, artfully crafted, and wholly different from adult literature—that allows children to use fantasy to make sense of their worlds.  He also uses this book to warn against fluffy and censored children’s stories that are devoid of danger and conflict.  How can Hansel and Gretel be heroes without the villain of the witch, after all?

A great strength of this book is the author’s use of illustrations from children’s literature generously interspersed through the book.  The book is well-researched and an excellent jumping-off point for the study of children’s literature or child psychology, as the unique needs of children are considered as their stories are dissected.