“The first thing you do is kill off the parents”. It’s a standard beginning to many stories for and about children. Parents want to protect their children, and for the main character to start on his or her journey, and overcome obstacles independently, the parents have to go.
Sometimes the parents are just absent, out of selflessness, or self-centeredness, or fear. Percy Jackson’s mother sends him away to prevent monsters from finding him; Ella, from Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted, is left behind while her merchant father travels; Medusa, in the Goddess Girls books, is totally neglected by her parents because, unlike her sisters, she is mortal. And sometimes their absence helps to drive the story: in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg and Charles Wallace travel through space and time to rescue their father; and without the sacrifice Harry Potter’s parents make to save him, he wouldn’t be The Boy Who Lived. It’s hard to tell a story about growing up without exploring both love and loss.
Adults worry a lot about fantasy violence– battles against mythical monsters or in unbelievable worlds. But the key word there is “unbelievable”. R.L. Stine has said that when he writes for children he makes sure that there is no way they will carry over their fears into believing that what has happened in the books could take place in real life. When a gifted writer immerses us in intense emotions, it’s much more powerful, and sometimes scarier than anything supernatural.
Children’s literature is filled with death and violence– it’s inescapable. As adults who love children and want to protect them, and who want to share our love of reading, that can be really hard for us to handle. But I think it’s really important that we trust kids to tell us what they can handle. It’s really wrenching to read some of these books with my kids right now. It’s honestly the books that aren’t marketed as horror, or even scary, that make a real emotional impact. The Monster Kid won’t stay in the room if there’s any kind of realistic death that takes place in a book, although the mayhem in the Percy Jackson books doesn’t bother him, and he’s a fan of Goosebumps. His sister sobbed through parts of Ella Enchanted after Ella’s mother died, but insisted I keep going. Tiffany Aching’s long meditations on her grandmother’s death, in The Wee Free Men, didn’t touch her as deeply. Upon learning that the parents of the main character die at the beginning of The Secret Garden, though, she decided to pass. We’ll get there someday, when she’s ready.
As uncomfortable as it can be to share some stories, it’s a great disservice to developing the reading life of a child to completely avoid the darkness. The kids already know it’s there.
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