Hooway for Wodney Wat Book

I have a major problem with this book. I read it for a conference I will attend this Fall. It's part of a group of books on the theme of bullying. I think children's books about bullying are used to serve two main purposes. One is to teach the lesson that picking on each other is wrong and the other is to help kids who are bullied feel like they're not the only ones, and learn strategies to help them cope with bullies. Hooway for Wodney Wat sends a message that doesn't suit either of those purposes.

Wodney is a sympathetic little rat. The illustrations of him hiding in his jacket due to the extreme shyness brought on by his difficulty pronouncing the letter R are priceless. I was rooting for him in the first half of the story. And Camilla, too, despite her bullying ways, had a sympathetic sort of quality as well. I think, on some scale, all of us who work with kids know children who are like her. But I expected both Wodney and Camilla to be somehow appreciated for their positive qualities, those special things about them that make them who they are, and that make the other kids want to befriend them.

What happens instead, though, is that Wodney stoops to the level of the classmates who bullied him in the first place, and Camilla, who I honestly didn't think was supposed to be purely evil, is driven from town never to be seen again. It's a realistic ending in many ways, because children do sometimes solve their own problems with bullying by bullying someone else to become part of the in crowd. But do we want to say "hooway" to that? Or do we want to use picture books to teach a better, more understanding, and more empathetic, way of coexisting with other people? Yes, there are books where it is appropriate and humorous to send the bad guy running for the hills due to his own stupidity. But it's unsettling when that bad guy is the animal equivalent of a chubby little girl with a lot to learn about classroom manners. I'd be curious to know what children think when they hear this story, but I don't feel right sharing it with them to try and find out.

Thankfully, also included in the stack of books I'm reading is Oliver Button is a Sissy by Tomie DePaola, which makes for an excellent alternative, and a much more hopeful story, which is also realistic.