Powerful Magic: Learning From Children's Responses to Literature (review)

"I don't think they would, but they probably would." This is thirteen-year-old Vinny's response to the question, "Do you think they'll die?" after he reads a scene of violence and fantasy justice in Virginia Hamilton's The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (152). His reaction is the curious mixture, magical in its own way, of literary, self-, and cultural knowledge that children use as they construct a use for what they read. Vinny is combining what he understands of the bandits and the god-characters cued by the book, and what he knows from other fantasy stories where death might be sudden or mercy might be dealt, with his own sense of justice and fair play. Because The Magical Adventures doesn't answer the question, we see in Vinny's layered response his need to double the modal, self-contradict, and layer hedges against the certainty of the words themselves. Vinny might prefer a black-and-white ethic but his knowledge of narratives, characters, and real world justice tells him something else.

Powerful Magic: Learning from Children's Responses to Literature by Vinny's mother, Nina Mikkelsen, looks explicitly at children reading fantasy literature, and addresses individual, collaborative, and adult-guided responses of children from five to twelve years of age as they consider fantasy in wordless books, picture books, and narratives such as Tolkein's The Hobbit. Mikkelsen's study of her two sons, children of her relatives and friends, and a second grade classroom gives her an insider's level of information about these children's lives and reading experiences that we don't get in more scientific studies of children's responses. Mikkelsen knows what these children were reading last week, why one child doesn't like fantasy stories in the first place, and how, two years after reading The Magical Adventures, Vinny is still inventing and explaining the world through his reading. The strongest parts of the book are Mikkelsen's own analyses of how the children were using what they knew and felt to construct meaning out of the fantasy stories they were reading, rereading, drawing, and retelling. They apply socio-cultural knowledge, they fill in gaps when they don't understand something, they identify strongly with some characters and not others, they resist where they know the narrative is going to take them. These are clear responses we can see in the children's thinking through Mikkelsen's reporting. Consequently, when Mark identifies frozen food packages in the freezer in the illustrations for Raymond Brigg's The Snowman as "gold nuggets," Mikkelsen suggests he's not misinterpreting, but using his prior knowledge about what those illustrations could mean and building gold nuggets into his telling of the story.

Mikkelsen provides a cornucopia of reader response theories and pulls principally from Anne Dyson, Louise Rosenblatt, Margaret Meek, and Roland Barthe. Although Mikkelsen sets out to blend these theories into her discussion, it's her cooption of these ideas to explain her own theory of "live circuits" of meaning that is the more fertile ground in her book. Her analysis of a child's response into "fields of literacy" or "literary transactions" with codes in the book is consistent and interesting, but again the real power comes in her storytelling about Vinny, Mark, Charlotte, and Lolly. Children's responses to fantasy happen in and around and as narrative, and thus are revealed most clearly through Mikkelsen's own narrative.

Ultimately, what Mikkelsen's study does is explain the ground between those who want children to read only books without violence or frightful images because fantasy affects them too directly (reading about violence engenders violence) and those who want children to read anything because literature doesn't much affect them in the face of reality (it's just...