Reading notes: 'Make Believe'

02 Jul, 2026

Here is Mac Barnett's Make Believe, a small wonderful book about how important children's literature is, and how often we fail at it.

1. Here as elsewhere, the fact that children often have different needs from adults shouldn't keep us from considering whether what is appropriate for one group is appropriate for another. Barnett is exactly right to point out that we're much too didactic in the literature we make for and give to children, and that one symptom of this is that we do not in general apply such a didactic approach to literature for adults.
2. That said, Barnett might be underestimating the level of didacticism in the books adults are giving to themselves these days.
3. The extended discussion of Margaret Wise Brown is wonderful. Not long ago I read John Carey's The Accidental Professor, which includes a brief summary of his criticism of the modernists: roughly, that they were too often intentionally inaccessible, which is fundamentally undemocratic. This must be a complicated story, though, because Brown was in some sense a modernist, and Goodnight Moon is highly accessible. (Weird, but accessible, and also great.)
4. In the hardcover version I read, the asterisks often blended visually into adjacent letters or punctuation, and I often missed a footnote until I got to the end of the page. I mention this not to complain, but to reflect on the fact that so much goes into the format and typesetting of a book, and I rarely notice almost any of it. (Here as elsewhere, there can be tradeoffs between accessibility and other virtues.)
5. In a footnote on page 41, Barnett notes that he doesn't know whether Brown's view of children is supported by the latest science, but "I just know she's right." Even if one has perfect faith in the establishments that generate scientific and educational research, there are whole categories of questions that don't have answers we can read off such research. I think most people, in most contexts, find this uncontroversial, but there can be surprisingly many obstacles to recognizing this in practice.
6. If you, like a very recent version of me, are unfamiliar with Barnett and Google his name or the name of this book, you're likely to see the controversy about his claim that most children's literature is "crud." Whatever you think about that claim, this book is really good and worth reading, and I'm not praising the book at length in order to take a side about that.¹

This is the second wonderful, small book about children's literature I've read this year. I'll happily read as many of these as people write.

#children's literature #parenting #reading notes