Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America Book

I don't know much about kids, but I'm positive that most kids don't give a flying fuck if Harold Bloom cares about the books they are reading, or if he says that their favorite novel is not considered a classic. To be fair to Bloom, kids also don't care what Derrida, Jameson, Fyre, Edmund Wilson, Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, Henry James or any other theorist thinks about their reading tastes. If you don't believe me go up to some Twilight fan and tell them that if Derrida were still alive he would probably never write a single word about the book they are reading and see if they don't do much more than stare blankly at you.

This woman cares though. She seems to care a lot about what these types of people think about children's books. But exactly what she wants I have no idea. She doesn't like them being treated as children books, she doesn't like them being 'turned' into adult books. She doesn't like any kind of criticism being leveled at them (for example it's ok to praise early Disney, but as soon as the quality of Disney starts to decline, you better not start taking critical pot-shots at the family industry he has created and is now milking), but she also doesn't want the critical (i.e., academic) world to not mention them either.

I think she would be happiest if everyone just smiled a lot and wrote articles about how wonderful books she likes are.

There are so many things wrong with this book. She never really proves much about the quality of the books she is arguing for. Instead she relies on things like sales statistics, appearances on librarian's reading lists (and at what number, sometimes to my bewilderment when she gets annoyed at a book only being number four on a list) and the number of times a book has been written about (or not written about) in academic journals. That's fine, but is the book any good? What makes it that attention should be paid to the book? According to her criteria in the future, the late 20th century literature that should be most deserving of being studied is James Patterson and Nora Roberts. The numbers don't lie. (This though might be more true in her eyes than one would think, she also seems to have the opinion that the NYT Best-seller list is a be all end all of cultured readers.)

This author suffers from an infantile malady that is not uncommon in our country, and especially not among people of the baby-boomer generation. It's not that she loves children's books, but that she seems stuck in the developmental stage where she can not fathom someone having a differing opinion than her. Children have this. They can't understand why someone doesn't like what they like, or how someone can like something they hate. People stuck in this stage of development really like to be in the majority, they like to see that their favorite records are on best-selling lists, that their favorite authors have best-seller written on them. Popularity to them is synonymous with quality. Not that they choose what they like based on what is popular, but they get angry when what they love isn't universally adored. (As a second experiment, tell a baby-boomer that you think the Rolling Stones (or pick a band) are over-rated, vaguely talented and derivative (this argument works for most bands, because most of them are (that's not to say enjoyment can't be had from over-rated, vaguely talented and derivative bands)), I can almost guarantee one of the first arguments they come sputtering out with is about how popular the Stones (or Dylan, or whatever band or person you choose) is. Try it. To really get someone's goat use The Beatles, even if you don't agree with the criteria, just see if they say something extolling their musical virtues, or rather do they say something about Beatlemania, how many people liked them).

There are so many more things I can go off on.
I won't though, I almost gave it three stars because it inspired so much rancor in me against baby-boomers, but it's really only a two star book.