Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

Plenty of scholars can attest to the fact that children’s literature is no stranger to death and/or mayhem, and in this volume Abate argues that lethal violence has a long and bloody standing in books for children and that its presence and various iterations in such books mirrors the conceptions of death, fear, victimhood, crime, and even childhood in society at large. Focusing each of her six chapters on a particular work, Abate examines the role of homicide in such classics as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tarzan of the Apes as well as more contemporary works such as Walter Dean Myers’ Monster and Stacey Jay’s My So-Called Death. In one of the more fascinating chapters, Abate convincingly argues that Snow White is not a tale of filial jealousy by which children can work through their feelings of powerlessness at the hands of adults but rather an opportunity for parents to indulge in the fantasy of infanticide. The Queen’s refrain of “Off with their heads” in Alice in Wonderland is linked to the antigallows movement in England while Myers’ Monster displays kinship with colonial execution sermons. The author’s second frame to her argument, that these books enjoy particular prominence and celebration in the United States, however, is less persuasive, and the correlation between WorldCat records of these titles and anecdotal evidence of their popularity to America’s culture of violence seems tenuous at best. Still this is a compelling study of the ways in which the specter of violent death looms large in books for children, both historically and in modern literature, making this a valuable resource for scholars of the field. Endnotes, a list of works cited, and an index are included.