Nightlight!: Slate’s Pop-Up Children’s Book Blog
For the month of August Slate is focusing attention on children’s books in their new “pop-up” blog, Nightlight! which aims to “explore the art—and the business—of literature for kids,” in daily posts illustrated by Tina Kügler (Snail and Worm).
The first post is a review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, calling it an “adequate” “delivery device for extremely informed Potter fan fiction,” and continuing, “If Cursed Child is … the first play an entire generation of children will read, theater might be in for a rough couple of decades.”
Laura Miller, Slate‘s books and culture columnist, writes about formidable NYPL childrens librarian Anne Carroll Moore. While her story is well known among childrens librarians and childrens lit fans, Miller introduces her to a wider audience, saying “Beatrix Potter considered her a close friend; she could summon William Butler Yeats to appear at her library events … she was reputed to be able to make or break a book, much as the New York Times’ theater critic was said to determine the fate of a new play.”
Moore believed most books for kids were inadequate. We can only imagine Moore’s reaction to the books discussed in another post titled, “My Kids Read Only Subliterary Branded Commodities. Yours Probably Do, Too!”, which refers to movie and TV tie-ins for kids as “subliterary commodities, book-like objects … the juvenile equivalent of pornography … it’s hard not to take offense at the contempt with which the publishers treat their readership.”
The post “We Don’t Only Need More Diverse Books. We Need More Diverse Books Like The Snowy Day” notes that children need to “learn the pleasure of reading a story in the relaxed, quiet moments before bed, reading not to learn but to feel safe, feel loved, laugh, wonder. That’s a fundamental privilege of childhood and should not be reserved for only one set of children.”