Children’s Literature and New York City ed. by Pádraic Whyte, Keith O’Sullivan (review)

If you fly at the right altitude above a good-sized city, you will usually see that it is laid out in some form of grid pattern. This gives the city an orderly look, as though the inhabitants must surely be living orderly, predictable lives. Of course, the paradox is that cities generally contain more chaos than does a comparable area of countryside. Cities, after all, are home to thousands or even millions of people who aren’t related to or acquainted with one another, most of whom seem to have urgent business that can’t wait for whoever’s dawdling in front of them to get out of the way. There’s almost every form of life experience in a city, happening all at once. A person living there can be almost as isolated as a desert hermit or can instead be surrounded by crowds, without a moment’s privacy. People go there to find themselves, to lose themselves, or to reinvent themselves; to get rich; to gain freedom from the constraints of suburban or small-town life; to become stars in the creative or performing arts; to experience the most recent trends that civilization has to offer; or because their parents dragged them there.

Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan’s collection of articles deals with one of the most iconic cities on the planet. New York isn’t just an individual city, although it is unique. In many ways it is City, with all the aspects of urban life seen in Houston or Shanghai, or in storied cities throughout history, even going back to Babylon. (In fact, some people who think of New York as a hotbed of sin and hedonism have referred to it as Sodom-on-the-Hudson.)

This collection, acknowledging the “shared or symbiotic relationship” between children’s literature and New York, ranges through literature dealing with New York City but emphasizes books set in Manhattan and created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from picture books up through young adult fiction. Julie Anne Stevens, Helen Conrad-O’Briain, and Katie Trumpener write about earlier works such as Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy series (written mostly in the 1940s), George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square (1960), and the Reys’ Curious George books (1941–66), respectively. Margaret Wise Brown’s and Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s new realism from the 1940s has an especially strong link with New York, emanating from the city’s Bank Street College of Education. Joseph Stanton’s article “Bank Street and Beyond” analyzes the way Brown’s and Mitchell’s books use the rhythms of the city to create reality-based stories, rather than fairy tales or fantasies, to develop the minds of very young children. At the opposite end of the age spectrum, various articles explore the often difficult aspects of urban life faced by older children and adolescents, such as drugs, violence, homelessness, sexual identity, and the serious illness of a parent. The presence of nature in a big city is not neglected, either. In “Cities Will Sing: Natural New York,” Jenny Bavidge examines New York’s natural aspects such as its largest green space, Central Park, which is of course not entirely unspoiled nature but is a man-made landscape accommodating joggers, cyclists, horseback riders, and the Central Park Zoo. On the other hand, the pitiless aspect of the city’s outdoor spaces when one is homeless is also examined, in a study by Suzanne Marie Hopcroft of the YA novels Slake’s Limbo and Ten Mile River.

Finding or coming to terms with one’s identity is an important aspect of much of children’s literature, and this collection deals with gender/sexual identity as well as ethnic identity in several articles, including “I Am an Island: Caribbean Immigrants to New York City in Children’s Literature,” by Kevin Sands-O’Connor, and Pádraic Whyte’s “Navigating Adolescence Through the...