The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers ed. by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker (review)

Routledge’s long-standing Children’s Literature and Culture series was begun under the aegis of Garland Publishing and initially edited by Jack Zipes. Now ably vetted by Philip Nel, the series provides a major resource for the study of children’s literature in English. (Obligatory conflict notice here: Like many other contributors to this journal, I published an early title in this series myself, in the days of Zipes and Garland.) Everything about this series is useful and attractive except for its horrible hardback prices. No doubt Routledge can make a commercial case for these charges, but they are discouraging to interested scholars, and few libraries have bottomless pockets either.

Just as this series answers a significant need in the field, so does this particular title in the series settle into a niche that was surprisingly empty before its arrival. In 2013, Katharine Capshaw Smith, then the editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, pointed out a shortage of serious scholarship on the subject of books designed for children just mastering the act and art of reading. Jennifer Miskec and Annette Wannamaker took up the challenge, with impressive results. Their book contains fifteen chapters organized into four sections, plus the editors’ introduction. It addresses a fascinating range of titles aimed at attracting and supporting children as they learn to read.

By accident a few years ago, I encountered a term some might consider contradictory: “exciting yet safe” (see Mackey for a fuller account of this label). Nowhere is such a paradox more fully engaged than in the world of first titles for fledgling readers, who tend to require security in order to reinforce their interpretive confidence, yet relish novelty that entices them onward into the text. This complex need is often successfully met by a series of titles, wherein the characters and setting are known but the adventures are new. Many of the books under consideration here, therefore, are part of a sequence of multiple titles involving the same characters, and many of them are, indeed, “exciting yet safe.” Some, however, appeal to new readers by being scary and/or subversive, and it is worth remembering that reading also offers the pleasures of risk.

In their introduction, Miskec and Wannamaker set out the parameters of their project with a list of stimulating questions about what many might see as very small and unassuming texts:

What is it about these works of literature, which, on the surface at least, appear to be simple texts, that makes the best of them so appealing to beginning readers just learning to navigate the written word? What sorts of aesthetic and literary repertoire do these books require and engender? Because these books are often sold in series meant to be collected, how do these material and economic conditions shape readership and content? How do gender-specific marketing strategies hail imagined readers? How is the world being presented to the newly independent reader, and how is this reader being constructed in and by these texts?

(2)

The editors move on to define their territory: “the group of loosely affiliated texts that most often (though not always) are published in series; contain an extended narrative that is likely to be broken into episodes; and that feature repetitive, sometimes formulaic, plots featuring the same characters” (4). I will follow their lead by referring to the books with the capitalized term Early Readers, while referring in the lower case to the young humans who peruse them, early readers.

The first section of the book, “History,” contains three chapters. Ramona Caponegro explores the line of descent of American books aimed at beginning readers from the New England Primer to The Cat in the Hat. She points out that while simple and accessible content has frequently been taken as the core identifier of such works, the role of design is also crucial; her...