Story time: the five children’s books every adult should read
Posted by The Editor on July 26, 2019 6:00 am
Tags: Books, Children and teenagers, Culture, Eva Ibbotson, Fiction, JM Barrie, Katherine Rundell, Maurice Sendak, Michael Bond, Philip Pullman
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Children’s books explore hope, fear, failure and love. Katherine Rundell on how the best of them can ignite the imagination of all readers, whatever their age
I have been writing children’s fiction for more than 10 years now, and still I would hesitate to define it; it is a slippery, various, quicksilver thing. But I do know, with more certainty than I usually feel about anything, what it is not: it is not exclusively for children. When I write, I write for two people, myself, age 12, and myself, now, and the book has to satisfy two distinct but connected appetites.
My 12-year-old self wanted autonomy, peril, justice, food and above all a kind of density of atmosphere into which I could step and be engulfed. My adult self wants all those things, and also: acknowledgments of fear, love, failure. So what I try for when I write – failing often, but trying – is to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember.