The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (review)

In the spring of 2001, I arrived somewhat late on Rowling’s infamous Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Assisting a mother and her ten-year-old son in locating Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from the shelves of the large academic library in which I worked, I stood dumbfounded as a passing undergraduate student stopped and began a conversation with the child about the book in hand. The child’s mother, having read Harry’s adventures as well, soon joined in, and the three individuals, spanning three separate generations, debated the series at length. I checked Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone out that night.

Within The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership, Rachel Falconer explores this phenomenon of “crossover” reading—of adults reading and engaging with novels principally directed at children—which I and so many others have witnessed in libraries, schools, bookstores, airports, train stations, and the like. Why has children’s fiction gained such unprecedented popularity with adults over the last decade? The answer, as Falconer writes, “lies partly in the texts themselves and partly in the changing tastes and habits of contemporary readers” (7). Within The Crossover Novel, Falconer explores the cultural landscape of modern adult readership in Britain alongside the works of J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Mark Haddon, Geraldine McCaughrean, David Almond, and C. S. Lewis, illustrating connections among the social, economic, and political aspects of contemporary life and the thematic elements of the texts themselves in order to provide a detailed understanding of the crossover phenomenon as a whole.

Chapter 1, entitled “Kiddults at Large,” is foundational and explores the rise of crossover reading in Britain in the late 1990s and early millennium. Paying special attention to important social, political, technological, and literary happenings, Falconer sketches links between the re-emergence of the “inner child” in Britain’s “kiddult” culture and the resulting popularity of children’s clothing, marketing campaigns, and fiction. Drawing on British radio, television, book clubs, and literary awards, Falconer paints a wide cultural canvas to illustrate the atmosphere in which supposedly “children’s” books were enthusiastically embraced by all ages.

Beginning with chapter 2, Falconer turns her attention to specific texts and topics within crossover literature as they relate to the interests of adult readers. Chapters 2 through 7 each examine a popular crossover novel with respect to the themes within it that struck a chord among the adult population. While readers will undoubtedly discover numerous connections between the themes and texts themselves, Falconer attempts to isolate and thus explain the major currents within crossover reading through the novels as well as through scholarship from a diverse range of theorists, writers, and sources.

Rowling’s Harry Potter series receives immediate attention in chapter 2 as Falconer explores Italo Calvino’s notion of lightness and weight in literature with respect to the boy wizard. Subtly drawing astute associations between Calvino’s theory and Freud’s notions of Eros and Thanatos, Falconer’s observations and well-placed wit (“Wingardium Graviosa”) are especially applicable to the interplay of light-hearted mystery and weightier topics of evil and death in Rowling’s stories that so tantalize adults and children alike.

Falconer’s discussion of coming of age in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and “seeing things big” in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-time, the subjects of chapters 3 and 4 respectively, seem diametrically opposed yet are closely related. While Pullman’s work is fantastical and Haddon’s a novel of “luminous realism,” both attempt to “convey a sense of ‘the extraordinary inside the ordinary’” through the concepts of space and the imaginations of their child protagonists (95). Postmodernism and the writings of St. Augustine serve as Falconer’s theoretical underpinnings for these two chapters and add to the dizzying array of scholarship upon which she calls throughout the text.

In chapter 5, Falconer deals with...