Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood Book

Enchanted Hunters is a thoroughly researched, well organized, and intelligently written examination of the complexity and wonder of childhood reading.

The author eloquently identifies why books have the power to captivate young readers: Held together by rubber bands, duct tape, and rusting paper clips, [books] serve as companions and compass roses, offering shocks, terrors, and wonders, as well as wisdom, comfort, and sustenance.

The history of children's literature is explored, following its evolution from stuffy tales of morality to tantalizing invitations for adventure:

From its inception, children's literature had been a vehicle for moral instruction, spiritual edification, and behavioral coaching. Stories invariably broadcast the news that curiosity and disobedience -- not mere carelessness or clumsiness -- invited calamity.

The rise of the fairy tale created a tectonic shift in children's literature and revealed that something had long been off-kilter. Fairy tales -- sometimes referred to as "wonder tales" because they traffic in magic -- opened the door to new theaters of action, with casts of characters very different from the scolding schoolmarm, the aggravated bailiff, or the disapproving cleric found in manuals for moral and spiritual improvement.

Adults who crafted memorable children's books are discussed in great detail, and their books are examined for the components that made them successful (authors like J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, Philip Pullman, and J. K. Rowling, to name a few).

Above all, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood challenges authors to create children's books that will appeal to young minds and invite little ones to fall in love with reading: Great children's literature creates new worlds that children enter with delight and perhaps with apprehension and from which they return with understandings that their own experience could not have produced and that give their lives new meaning.