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  • Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up: A Memoir
  • Lisa Rowe Fraustino (bio)
Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up: A Memoir. By Barbara Feinberg. Beacon Press, 2004.

What I find most interesting about Barbara Feinberg's first book, Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up: A Memoir, isn't what the author has to say about children's books—though she has plenty to say—but rather how the publisher has positioned the book for market. A press release enclosed with the book concludes that "Welcome to Lizard Motel is sure to be read and talked about among parents and educators who see in problem novels a disturbing reflection of our changed notions of childhood." Also enclosed was a sheet of recommendations (mostly repeated on the back jacket) from the likes of Noelle Oxenhandler, author of The Eros of Parenthood; Richard Lewis, author of Living by Wonder: The [End Page 274] Imaginative Life of Children; and Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia. In fact, Pipher also has her name on the front cover with the quote "Fresh and fantastic."

Interestingly, though the book title came up as literary criticism on an Internet search, none of the advance praisers are scholars in children's literature, or even in education or librarianship. Lawrence Weschler, a former editor of The New Yorker, calls Feinberg's text "a lyrical polemic—angry yet beautifully rendered—against the sorry state of much of what passes for children's and young adult literature nowadays." Peter Trachtenberg, author of 7 Tatoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, comments on Feinberg's "remarkable" memoir: "In setting out to find out why her son so disliked the books his teachers were giving him to read, Barbara Feinberg has crafted what is at once an intellectual mystery story and a fiercely reasoned critique of contemporary children's literature, a critique that gradually grows to encompass our notions of how children are supposed to learn and, indeed, what they are supposed to be."

Though Welcome to Lizard Motel was not slated for publication until August 23, 2004, reviewers also received a copy of a starred review from Publishers Weekly, published May 17, 2004, its forecast stating: "The implications of this small book are quite large. Parents will want to read it, as will writers, publishers and educators." Apparently, we are supposed to read this book with its importance predetermined, for it will "stir some much-needed controversy, especially among 'progressive' educators," according to PW.

If we are to judge this book by its cover, or by the opinion of Mary Pipher, it's "Fresh and fantastic." The memoir approach may be fresh, but the ideas about children's books in Welcome to the Lizard Motel aren't—at least not to those who study and teach children's literature. The book is, however, in some ways, fantastic. Barbara Feinberg writes very well; in often lyrical prose, she transports her reader along the journey she herself followed as a mother who wanted to find out why having to read books for school seemed always to depress her twelve-year-old son. Within this obsessive pursuit, she weaves details of family life, childhood memories, and her experiences as director of a creative arts program for children. She not only captivates the reader with her voice but also gives us the "fantastic," in the sense of fantasy, reminding us of the imaginative ways that children play and how child's play relates, or ought to relate, to children's stories. Her descriptions of the Story Shop Feinberg has operated since the 1990s, in which children beginning at the age of three meet regularly to write, tell, and perform their original stories, made me want to return to my childhood just so I could spin stories from boxes and "sea glass, keys, old envelopes, doorknobs, broken yoyos" (105).

However, the adult scholar, children's book author, and former fifth-grade teacher in me recoils at some of the unfairly narrow conclusions Feinberg leads her readers to draw about the current state of [End Page 275] children...

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