Sticks and Stones

Children's Literature? Have children ever really had a literature of their own? Jack Zipes - translator of the Grimm tales, teacher, storyteller, and scholar - has never flinched from the hard questions about kids and books. In Sticks and Stones he raises the stakes for everyone who cares about children's literature and culture. From the grisly nineteenth century moralism of Slovenly Peter (whose fingers get cut off) to the wildly successful Harry Potter books, children's literature is in many ways the 'grown-ups' version' - a story about childhood that adults tell kids. And that, argues Jack Zipes, can be a problem: even the experts don't really know what children make of what we give them.
Sticks and Stones argues that despite common American assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity.
With refreshing independence, Jack Zipes contends that children are best served neither by the current polemics of the religious right or the radical left. Our society may believe that it is providing children with the materials and space in which to grow, but kids are becoming homogenized. Children's literature is a booming market whose success, he says, is disguising its limitations.
Sticks and Stones is a forthright and engaging book by someone who cares deeply about what and how children read.