Page 17 - Luce 2024

B ooks an d Authors

Exploring ‘families’ in Why is the only good parent a dead parent?
Children’s Literature Even in fantasy literature, it would stretch a reader’s credulity
too far to expect them to believe that a parent would allow
their child to cavort with wolves and bears in the jungle, work
Dr Eleanor Spencer-Regan and Dr Jade Dillon Craig’s new as a teenage spy for MI5, rob priceless artworks from the great
volume Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature was museums of Europe or fight the most powerful dark wizard
published by Routledge in 2023 and has been shortlisted of the age.
for the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies
(BACLS) edited collection prize. Here, they reflect on the Instead, parents must necessarily be either physically absent
familiar tropes found in many of our childhood favourites and or, at the very least, emotionally distant. There exists, then,
the importance of broad representation. a very practical understanding between authors and readers;
parents must be disposed of, ideally swiftly and with no
‘In the beginning there is light and two wide-eyed figures questions asked.
standing near the foot of your bed, and the sound of their
voices is love.’ So begins Love (2018) by Newbery Medal- Often this imperative is achieved even before the story
winning author Matt de la Pena and illustrator Loren Long. begins or in its very first pages. In Roald Dahl’s James and the
The bestselling picture book ends with the lines: Giant Peach (1961), for example, young James’ parents are
dispatched with ruthless and comic summariness:
So when the time comes for you to set off on your own …
your loved ones will stand there like puddles beneath their Then, one day, James’ mother and father went to London
umbrellas, holding you tight and kissing you and wishing to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened.
you luck. But it won’t be luck you’ll leave with. Because Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind
you’ll have love. You’ll have love, love, love. you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry
rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.
However, the course of true (familial) love rarely does run
smooth. Fairy tales may end with ‘happily ever after’, but
they decidedly do not begin that way. Fictional families, like
families in real life, seem to be brittle and precarious things,
prone to fracturing and fragmenting.

While there are obviously examples of happy, healthy
heteronormative nuclear families in children’s literature from
all decades – think of Judith Kerr’s Mog series or Johnny
Duddle’s The Pirates Next Door – it is clear that from the
mid-twentieth century onwards, authors of children’s and
Young Adult (YA) literature have sought to reflect with greater
verisimilitude the realities of family life in all its varied shapes
and forms. In James and the Giant Peach, James’ parents are dispatched
with ruthless and comic summariness. (Image: Disney / X)
This evolution is explored in a
new book we co-edited, Family The only good parent in some children’s literature, it seems,
in Children’s and Young Adult is a dead parent, preferably one that died long enough ago to
Literature. allow any inconvenient grief work to have been satisfactorily
completed by their unfortunate offspring.
For most of the history of western
children’s literature, only a narrow In a 2010 article in Publishers Weekly, children’s book editor
range of familial experiences was Leila Sales reported: ‘Dead parents are so much a part of
‘reflected’ in children’s literature. middle-grade and teen fiction at this point, it’s not even the
Readers became familiar with both “in” thing. It’s not “au courant” or “en vogue”. It’s just an
the bourgeois ‘ideal’ of the white, accepted fact: kids in books are parentless.’
heteronormative nuclear family and,
conversely, the plight of the She decries the recourse to what she calls ‘The Ol’ Dead Dad
orphaned child. Syndrome’ as ‘lazy writing’ and encourages authors to explore
alternative ways of liberating child protagonists from parental
The plucky orphan protagonist has been a stock character supervision:
in children’s literature for centuries. Many of the canonical
or ‘classic’ children’s stories focus on the trials and eventual Set the book at boarding school, summer camp, or
triumphs of an orphaned (or at least bereaved) child, and the another parent-free zone. Create parents who are clueless
trope remains a popular one for contemporary authors, too. or uninvolved, à la Harriet the Spy. Fade their role into the
background. Write parents who actually have something to
Protagonists like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Rudyard contribute to the story, who aren’t just a barrier between
Kipling’s Mowgli and L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green the kids and fun.
Gables have been followed in more recent years by Diana
Wynne Jones’ Cat Chant, Lemony Snicket’s Baudelaire Escape to boarding school
children, and Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider. From the school stories of Angela Brazil (1906–1946); the Billy
J anet Clarke Hall 17