Are "Children's Classics" Any Good?

I've sat on this post for a while, deciding if I still agreed with it, but I think I do:

For several months recently, I worked as a clerk and book-buyer at a used bookstore. Shelving books was a major part of the job, and a lot of the shelving was in the extensive children's section.

The store had a pretty good selection, including three or four shelves of children's classics. Most of these books were actually "special adaptations"--simplified versions that contained most of the important plot points (at least the child-friendly ones), but none of the tone or spirit of the original writing. For example, the Great Illustrated Classics version of The Wizard of Oz begins, "Dorothy lived with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry on a small farm in Kansas." In Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the actual first sentence reads, "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife."

I still haven't read this book. Can you believe it?

The more I see these adaptations, the more annoyed I get. It's bad enough that the series creators decided to dumb down classic children's books like Peter Pan and A Little Princess. Readers of these books, who probably won't know any better, won't get to experience the authors' original styles, and may miss out on important plot points that add emotional subtlety to the narrative.

Worse, though, is when companies like this produce watered-down versions of Moby Dick and Pride and Prejudice. These stories were meant for adults, and you can't pare them down enough for children to digest without really gutting them.

I'm not saying kids shouldn't read the original novels. If they can understand the writing, and appreciate some of the themes, then that's awesome. But by reading these adaptations, they're only getting the plot--and the same basic plot can tell a lot of different stories, depending on the author's motivation.

Look, for example,  at the first pages of Great Illustrated Classics' Pride and Prejudice adaptation.  It's missing all its sarcastic humor--all Mrs. Bennet's silliness, and all the restrained nastiness of her husband's barbs. You'd never guess it was meant as a piece of social criticism. Boiled down like this, it's not a work of literature anymore--just a story.

"And they all lived happily ever after."

Thinking about this, I came to the idea that a reader who can't handle a work of literature in its original form isn't ready to receive the story's message. When I was seven or eight, for example, I read an abridged version of A Tale of Two Cities. I felt very smug for having read such a famous book, but I couldn't tell you what it was about--I could barely follow the plot. As far as I know, it made no emotional impact; all I have is the vague memory of someone swimming across the English Channel, and of a woman knitting secret messages in a corner.

Of course, I do hope to read the book again someday. It's pretty far down my list, though: the abridgement did nothing to pique my interest. Really, should an eight-year-old be expected to grasp the themes of something like Huckleberry Finn, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?

Something about a squid...?

I understand that "kids' classics" are meant as a sort of introduction, but do they serve their intended purpose? How many kids who read things like the Great Illustrated Classics series are going to read the original works as adults? I'm sure many do, but I'm sure many don't. I could be entirely off-base, but my gut feeling is that there's not much good to be said about any form of bowdlerized art. If you can't appreciate the work in its original form, then you're not ready to read it. Such is my opinion.

Anyway, I had a lot more about translations that I was going to write here, but the post kind of exploded, so I decided to split it in two. What do you think about children's adaptations? Have you read an adaptation, then come back to the original work later? How do you think it affected your reading of the original?

Let me know--

Kate

 

Image credits: Wonderful Wizard of Oz cover via Wikimedia Commons; others via Karen's Whimsy.

On the Subject of Reviews (or, Goodreads and Me)

Over the past couple of years, there's been a lot of online discussion about whether it's appropriate for writers to post negative reviews--or even positive ones!--of other writers' work. A lot of people seemed to feel that it was unprofessional for writers to criticize other writers--like an artist publishing a critique of somebody else's painting, or a musician panning someone else's song. Because I aspired to publication myself, I decided to play it safe, and posted all of my reviews under an anonymous nickname.

Now that the book is almost finished, I've been thinking a lot about building my platform, and have been trying to link up all my online content so that people who are interested can find me in a lot of places. I've regretted a number of times that I couldn't link to my "anonymous" Goodreads account, both because I put a lot of thought into my reviews, and because reading is basically my primary interest. A lot of my friends are on Goodreads, and I love talking about the books I read. I'd love to widen the discussion by engaging with other fellow readers.

A few days ago, I decided to set up a secondary, "public" Goodreads page, where I could link my name to Five Stories for the Dark Months and any other ebooks I happened to publish. In the process, I accidentally linked the two accounts, and convinced myself for a few horrifying seconds that I had deleted my original account forever. When I finally figured out how to separate them (it was just a matter of disconnecting Facebook from the new account), I really became aware of how important my book reviews are to me, and how much I would have missed the interaction here if I had lost it. For that reason--and because I've always felt it was a teeny bit cowardly to keep my reviews hidden--I've decided to get rid of the secondary account, make the first account more or less public, and continue posting under my own full name.

Honesty is really important to me. If I feel strongly about something, then of course I want to express those feelings, even if they're negative. Since of course no one likes every book they read, there will necessarily be some negative reviews here--as there always have been. My personal book review policy (not to be confused with my movie review policy, wherein anything goes) is to be as kind and considerate to authors I haven't met as I would be to writers I meet in my writing group every two weeks. This means that, while I will not sugarcoat critiques, I will always do my best to refrain from snark. I will also be sure to highlight the good points even of books I find seriously problematic.

If you find a negative review of your work here, I know you're not going to be happy, but please understand that it isn't a personal attack. I know how much work goes into writing and editing a book, and I know that I have my blind spots just as everyone else has theirs. If you'd like to respond with a scathing critique of one of my own stories, then by all means go ahead--I could certainly use the publicity. : ) But I hope that, in the end, there will be no hard feelings from anything I post here, and that if we ever meet in person we can do so as friends.