One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography by Margaret Mackey (review)

This remarkable book takes as its “guiding principle . . . that the particular provides insights into the general” (20). Here the particular is an astonishing, in-depth examination of one child’s development as a reader at one particular temporal moment in one particular geographical location: Margaret Mackey’s own wise and witty documentation of exactly where, when, why, and how she encountered, devoured, resisted, or cherished a dazzling array of texts from ages one to thirteen (spanning the years 1950–1962), as a female child in a middle-class family growing up in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The general is a staggering wealth of brilliant revelations about nothing less than the underlying processes and lasting impacts of reading itself.

What Mackey provides is not a “detailed template of how everyone learns to read” (11), but “a complex understanding of the three-way relationship between a particular life and named, specific texts and the theories that help us understand how reading works” (17; emphasis in original). All reading, she insists, is done in a place and at a time, and the place and time matter. Thus her goal is “to explore the necessary role of specifics and particularities of one named reader’s textual life in order to investigate the necessary role of specifics and particularities in any reader’s textual life” (25).

The book is not, strictly speaking, a memoir. Mackey presents it as an “auto-bibliography” of the little girl who grew up to be a professor of library and information science at the University of Alberta—and, I would add, a leading, indeed foundational, figure in the academic field(s) of children’s literature. She shares abundant memories of picture books and chapter books; textbooks and Sunday School materials; magazines and newspapers; movies and television programs; sheet music and songs (including the estimated 600–650 hymns she sang each year); even cookbooks, knitting patterns, and Brownie badge descriptions. But with near-obsessive completeness, she also ferreted out each of these texts for adult rereading, illuminated with literature on the neuroscience of reading, psychological and literary theories of how stories affect us, academic work on bodies of texts such as girls’ series fiction, and reflections by other sensitive writers on their own childhood literacy. Her extensive bibliography alone is a great boon.

As we accompany her on this sweeping journey, it helps enormously that Mackey is such engaging company and that the place in which her childhood reading was done is so fascinating in its own right. An opening photograph shows Margaret, aged six, stirring breakfast porridge while reading, both situating her in her own distinctive time and place and creating a bond with all former bookish children everywhere. We vicariously share her expressed disdain for Helen Louise Thorndyke’s Honey Bunch (despite her avid reading of the series): “I did not want to be fixed in an amber of faux cuteness” (151). Her delight in Anne Shirley’s puffed sleeves is marshaled to show that “Once you learn that your own experience can vivify the words in front of you, you have taken a major step to becoming a reader” (152). Mackey preferred Judy Bolton and Beverly Gray to Nancy Drew, “who, however talented and successful she may have been as a teen detective, was actually a failure when it came to growing up” (161); she regarded the mystery component of the books as merely a “kind of temporary framework on which the essential ongoing story was suspended” (162). She’s primed to note the secondary theme of “what compromises are acceptable in the cause of finding a true home” in L. M. Montgomery’s Emily’s Quest when she first reads it as a homesick ten-year-old visiting her distant grandparents (256). Repeated stereotypes of suburban life in such TV series as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best seemed evidence of larger truths about family life despite their contradicting her own lived experience: “So many sources in agreement must be describing the actual...