The Big Smallness: Niche Marketing, the American Culture Wars, and the New Children's Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

As its title suggests, this is a book that, through its careful attention to detail, ends up examining the far-reaching implications of major shifts in the ways that many children's books are published. Such cultural critique is common with historical texts and cultures, but what makes Michelle Ann Abate's project so salient is that she takes on the nearly impossible task of attempting to understand the complex interplay among ideology, literature, and the publishing and culture industries as they exist in this exact, contemporary cultural moment.

Although this book was published in 2016 (which seems very long ago, considering the current speed of contemporary social, political, and media events), it is a timely, relevant, and important work of cultural criticism that illuminates one of the reasons that Americans of different political stripes base their core belief systems on very different sets of facts, senses of reality, and alternative—and sometimes baffling—assumptions about such subjects as science and medicine. What is most significant about Abate's book is that it demonstrates precisely how certain ideas and ways of knowing are passed from one generation to the next within various subcultures and communities, often in ways that fly below the radar of the general public, the mass media conglomerates that publish the majority of mainstream children's books, and most children's literature and education scholars.

The Big Smallness closely examines several children's books written for narrowly defined niche markets. These books are self-published or published by small presses, but are financially viable because they can reach a broad, international audience via sites such as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. As Abate writes, "niche markets and the World Wide Web were made for each other" (13). Both have increased access for authors as well as readers and have helped to build and maintain a multitude of subcultures and interest groups—and, in both cases, the effects of these recent trends have been double-edged. While scholars in the twentieth century lamented the bland, commercial products and texts created by the culture industry through mass production, these twenty-first-century texts, "[e]merging from a powerful combination of the ease and affordability of desktop publishing software [and] the promotional, marketing, and distribution possibilities made possible by the Internet" (2), raise a whole new series of possibilities, challenges, and questions.

Indeed, far from being bland, safe, commercially viable texts, the picture books examined as case studies for this project make quite the quirky collection (some even became punchlines for late-night comedians, targets for Internet memes, and fodder for tsk-tsk-ing pundits): It's Just a Plant introduces child readers to marijuana; My Beautiful Mommy helps child readers to work through anxieties about parental cosmetic surgeries; Little Zizi focuses on a child who is teased and bullied because he has a small penis; Maggie Goes on a Diet follows its child protagonist's successful though problematic weight-loss journey; and Me Tarzan, You Jane is designed to "cure" children who may be "pre-homosexual." Ultimately, this is a carefully chosen sample of books that represent different positions on the political spectrum and a variety of topics.

Each chapter is bolstered with solid research about each book's author and subject matter, which helps to make visible any factual errors or misrepresentations that appear in books written mostly by nonexperts. Because these books are not published by mainstream presses, they do not need to appeal to mass audiences. However, independent publishing also means that the books may not go through rigorous fact checking or editing. While there is not enough space here to discuss every chapter, Abate's examination of the factual information presented in each book is a research method especially appropriate for this particular set of books and, perhaps, for this particular cultural moment.

Her emphasis on fact checking is especially eye-opening...