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

As a city that clearly speaks to the imagination of many readers and viewers, New York is a popular setting for literature, art, movies, and TV-shows. The broad array of titles discussed in this book show that children’s literature is no exception. The image of New York that arises from this large corpus—ranging from picture books to young adult literature—is complex and diverse. As the editors highlight in their introduction, New York “is as much an imagined space as it is a real place” (1). The approach of the researchers is as diverse as the primary works they are analyzing.

The book opens with a traditional historical section: first, a bio- and bibliographical description of Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Margaret Wise Brown and their works and, second, a reflection on childhood and modernity in Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet (by Julie Anne Stevens). The consequent chapters provide more innovative approaches to studying the city in children’s literature. Editor Keith O’Sullivan applies Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of “striated space” to Nick McDonell’s Twelve: Manhattan appears as a city organized in a Cartesian way, yet the novel also reveals the city’s wilderness and reveals existential issues in a teenager growing up in New York. Fellow editor Pádraic White matches queer studies with urban studies in his analysis of John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, linking the transformation of the adolescent protagonist to the evolution of the city. One article that resonates is Jo Lampert’s discussion of post-9/11 books; she relies on trauma studies, showing that the “literary journey becomes the nation’s journey” (111) as the novels often bring lonely people together. Central Park features prominently in Jenny Bavidge’s ecocritical reading of children’s books about New York—the Park functions as “a utopian, pastoral space” (63) in which children and animals thrive, but is not opposed to the urban narrative about New York. Jane Suzanne Carroll combines sartorial studies (the study of clothes) with carnival theory and urban studies in her analysis of, among other things, the New York classic par excellence, The Catcher in the Rye. Sonya Sawyer Fritz provides a unique analysis of “urban mobility” in children’s books about New York. In the light of many contemporary parents’ inclination to protect their children for fear of accidents and abduction, it is striking how characters like Harriet the Spy could roam the city freely, without adult supervision. It is a pity that the author doesn’t include more recent examples for comparison to assess the extent to which contemporary authors reflect on the increased limitation of children’s urban mobility. Several chapters—such as Katie Trumpener’s on Curious George and Valerie Coghlan’s on dystopian/utopian visual narratives—have a strong visual component. It is a real shame that the volume contains no illustrations at all.

Quite a few authors cast a critical eye on New York’s social and racial tissue: some articles have it as their central focus, from Suzanne Marie Hopcroft’s article on homeless teenagers to Karen Sands-O’Connor’s one on Caribbean immigrants, yet social and racial issues surface in various other pieces as well. Helen Conrad O’Brien reads The Cricket in Time Square, for example, as a story about integration and being accepted. Music is central to O’Brien’s article, connecting it to Roni Natov’s discussion of rock singer/poet Patti Smith’s Just Kids and her deconstruction of gender binaries. Like many articles in the volume, Natov invokes Eric Tribunella’s concept of the “child flâneur.” It would have been interesting to reprint this important article in the book, or have a more systematic discussion of it at one point, since it has...