Unfortunately, I didn't feel a ton of joy reading Handy's literary criticism of his chosen selection of children's literature. I did really like learning about each of the authors he selected--Margaret Wise Brown was fascinating!--and I liked learning about his analysis of each book. It was definitely worth a read for anyone who reads a lot of kids' books, because he chose a famous genre or author to write about in each chapter and clearly did a lot of research on it.
Some of it dragged, though, and I was very annoyed by his reflex reactions to Little Women and Anne of Green Gables: he didn't like the former and didn't even get through 30 pages of the latter. Of course, he's a grown adult man, which means he's not at all in the target audience for those books, but deciding to read (for the first time ever) these towering classics of children's literature as research for writing a book about children's literature completely misses the point of those books. Of course you won't like them in the way that a young girl would, or an adult re-reading them after loving them as a child. I think the nostalgia factor is huge in my pure joy that I get out of reading children's literature. It's not the only reason I love them--because I have had books that I don't love very much when I revisit them as adults--but I don't think I would love them as much now if I hadn't encountered them a long time ago. I feel like Handy misses the point by discussing their authors' backgrounds and breaking them down (although I did really like learning about them)--those aren't the reasons these books bring us joy. So that made the subtitle of his book a little misleading to me.
But maybe I'm just still offended by how much he hated Anne of Green Gables. How dare he.
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