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  • Children's Books on Rain Forests:Beyond the Macaw Mystique
  • Mary Harris Veeder (bio)

Because of their link to visual material and their need to explain the complexities of ecosystems and the realities of the economic world, rain forest books are an appropriate site for considering how well we explain our natural world to children. It is not so difficult to establish how far children's books on the rain forest have come; it is considerably more difficult to decide where they should go. First, adults will need to examine more critically the ways in which these books forge a relationship between nature and culture. And in order to recognize the highly constructed quality of their experience in reading rain forest books, many must put aside their own romantic view of nature, which sometimes overrides what we as critics know about the power of illustration and the number of conscious choices involved in illustration, authorship, and book design. Second, in considering how children read these texts, we need to move past the inherent negativity of a critical reading that finds most books deficient. Instead, we must read the books as advocates and teachers who do not seek perfection, but rather ask whether a work meets appropriate guidelines.

Two concepts should be present in rain forest books for younger readers—a sense of the forest's beauty and a sense of its ecological layering. The forest should be presented as having not a simple identity, but a multiple one. In books for somewhat older children, the author should convey both the beauty of the forest and the sense of its ecological levels without portraying it as a land of "others," full of exotics to be collected. Ideally, an older child would feel attracted to the forest's beauty, understand its multilayered existence, and yet recognize that seeing the forest is not owning it. Finally, adolescent readers making the transition to adult reading should begin to develop a cautious skepticism about the ways in which authors select, organize, and present their materials to achieve specific effects.

This argument begins with the premise that one can find examples of a good book, explores many that are not, and then ends with suggesting that "good" and "not-good" are inappropriate terms. I find such a zigzag argument justifiable because I think my path is one that many people have followed. The "good" world is followed by the "bad" world, which is followed by the world in which we live.

As a reviewer of children's books, I began to see more and more books on rain forests in the nineties, yet all of them seemed lacking in some way.1 As a professor of children's literature, I encourage those people who find no book good enough to analyze their own standards. Hence, I have assigned myself the task of discovering what makes a good rain forest book. This essay is the story of my own impatient quest for certainty, only to discover in the process of searching for it that the most interesting questions lie not in the dualities of "good" and "bad" books but in the borderland between. My initial survey left me either with books about which I had strongly negative feelings or with "worthy" titles that were unlikely to appeal to children. Realizing slowly that this "critical" lens was generating a smaller and smaller pile of books for children, I recognized the dead-end nature of the process. If no book could meet the standard, maybe the standard was inadequate.

Before framing a new model for evaluating children's rain forest books, it is useful to consider the older point of view. The rain forest initially appeared in children's literature primarily as a more remote version of the European forest. Those who entered the rain forest did so of their own volition, to acquire either the resources or the knowledge that its own inhabitants did not seem to value. This point of view is visible in Armstrong Sperry's The Rain Forest (1947). Designed for the ten- to twelve-year-old reader of the time, the novel follows Chad as he comes to spend his winter holiday with his...

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