June Reading: Some Great Fiction About Children and Childhood for Adults
Hello all,
It’s been a busy couple weeks, but I am taking some time this week to settle into summer. After a summer spent hiking 20+ miles a day last year, I find it hard to fully articulate the level of joy I take in having summer days to sleep in, get on the water, get a good dinner and still sleep in my own bed!
Today, I will be sharing two of my best books of June with you. Unintentionally, they both have LGBTQ+ characters and themes (which feels fitting for pride month), but also, they both do something I find really compelling, which is that they approach themes surrounding children and childhood from an adult perspective and they do it well!
The books below touch on childhood experiences in great detail, and they do it in a way that feels fairytale-esque and might even be considered slightly “child-like”. However, they are absolutely not children’s or young adult novels. In these stories, childhood is often traumatic. Children have to process adult experiences and as a reader, we get the opportunity to see how that affects them. In both fantastic and realistic ways, these books also touch on the ways that childhood traumas can mean adults stay more “childlike”, OR that children often have to become more “adultlike”.
As an educator, I think I am drawn to these books because I find childhood to be fascinating in and of itself. Specifically with these two books, I was also a child who drew comfort from books and fantasy worlds. In both The Wishing Game and the entire Wayward Children series, alternate worlds both provide a refuge and pose a very real danger to the kids who seek them. I find this such an interesting topic, both when looking at the literary escape of The Wishing Game and the very real alternate worlds of the Wayward Children series.
This may not be a topic for everyone, and I don’t even quote feel like I can say these books do this perfectly, but these subjects are what drew me to these books, kept me reading, and kept me thinking about them after!
The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
It isn’t too often that I basically read a book in one sitting, but this one was a fast enough and so easy to read that I ended up finishing it in a day. I don’t know that the writing and character development here quite lives up to what the author wanted to achieve, but the potential and heart is so huge, that for me and for what I wanted, this was a book that hit the spot, and I really loved it.
The story sets up a Willy Wonka/Westing Game-eque quest in which a famous children’s book author (who happens to live on an island in Maine that closely resembles the island in his cult-favorite books) announces a invitation-only contest on his island. He invites 4 people, all of whom were impacted by his books as children in various ways.
It isn’t too much of a spoiler to say that this whole premise is almost a MacGuffin for a warm-hearted tale of lonely people finding ways to connect with eachother and process past traumas. In fact, the writing style and the plot feel almost cozy, but the subject discussed (those past traumas) are NOT.
The hard topics mentioned or explored in this book include the death of parents, being abandoned and implied child molestation. The book moves so fast that the time given to these topics can feel brief and almost insufficient. Personally, knowing there was a happy ending, I felt like they addressed everything enough that I enjoyed the book, but it is worth knowing going in.
Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire
This is the latest installment in the the Wayward Children series, and while it was a tough one for me in terms of some of the subject matter, I think it is one of the best in the series, and the main character, Antsy is one of my favorites!
I have loved this series for years now. These are all novellas (under 200 pages) and the length can mean that some of the books are a little uneven, but overall, this series and this world is just great! It follows a group of children who have all entered “doors” and visited other worlds and returned (think Alice in Wonderland or Narnia), but it is not a YA series!
As you might imagine in a series full of misfit children, this series spends a lot of time with the question of what happens when children have to grapple with adult issues and make adult decisions. McGuire writes children exceptionally well, and if you are just dipping your toes into darker fantasy novels, I think these are a good place to start (In An Absent Dream isn’t the first one, but is a good first book to read – it feeds well into the first book, Every Heart A Doorway).
That’s all from me this week! Next week, I will be back with my summer series, looking at my husband’s favorite vacation genre (in which you read about exactly what you are doing or where you are)
