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  • The Big Smallness: Niche Marketing, the American Culture Wars, and the New Children's Literature by Michelle Abate
  • Amanda K. Allen (bio)
Michelle Abate. The Big Smallness: Niche Marketing, the American Culture Wars, and the New Children's Literature. New York: Routledge, 2016. Print.

Michelle Abate's The Big Smallness provides a "small bang theory" of niche book publishing for children. It acts, if readers will forgive my simile, as a literary turducken: the text is an impressive illustration of how to read picture books, wrapped in an analysis of the changing topography of twenty-first century children's publishing, and deliciously enveloped in an examination of the polarized American culture wars. Abate centers her book on careful analyses of five picture books: Ricardo Cortés's It's Just a Plant (2005), Michael Salzhauer's My Beautiful Mommy (2008), Paul M. Kramer's Maggie Goes on a Diet (2011), Thierry Lenian's Little Zizi (2007), and Janice Barrett Graham's Me Tarzan, You Jane (2011), placing them at the epicenter of a "synergistic relationship" between niche marketing and the ongoing U.S. culture wars. She suggests that niche-market picture books "reveal the way in which children, childhood, and children's literature are highly political as well as heavily politicized in the United States in the twenty-first century" (4). Crucially, she asserts that these texts therefore act as a barometer for measuring our perceptions regarding children, childhood, and, significantly, the function of narratives for younger readers.

These are large assertions for a book that focuses on only five texts published over a six-year period, but Abate's careful integration of picture book analysis with examinations of the political climate surrounding each "niche" provide a solid argument. In her introduction, she provides a background history of "nichification" in the United States, focusing on Americans' growing dissatisfaction with mass-produced goods during the 1960s and 1970s, and on the increasing power of goods marketed to specific groups such as women, racial and ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians. This historical overview allows the reader—particularly one not familiar with market economics—to understand the seeming paradox at the heart of niche markets: that by tailoring products to specialized groups, corporations are able to sell more than when they target a mass audience.

Abate suggests that this historical shift in marketing has been driven in large part by the polarization of the American political climate, leading to an economic shift from a "one-size fits all" mentality to "small batch customization." Children's literature, she reveals, is no exception to this shift. While she acknowledges that children's picture books have traditionally focused on [End Page 269] experiences and themes that were deemed to be universal, these new niche books "[reflect] the steady nichification of millennial life" (3) in that "they are about a very specific topic for an equally specific audience" (3).

Although the topics explored within each of her chosen texts cover a wide territory—including marijuana, a mother's plastic surgery, the small size of one's penis, pediatric obesity, and the ex-(pre)-gay movement—Abate carefully replicates similar patterns in each chapter, allowing her readers to compare seemingly incomparable areas. She does so by identifying the niche topic, providing a historical overview of that area, and interweaving this contextual information with a nuanced close reading of each text, using as her lens multiple theories of how picture books work, including those posited by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, Perry Nodelman, and Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles, as well as her own.

At first, Abate's historical contextualization may sometimes feel as if it is veering away from the main analysis. Her history of the criminalization of marijuana (which she provides in her analysis of Ricardo Cortés's It's Just a Plant), for example, highlights everything from hemp as a major crop for American colonists to Depression-era "reefer madness" hysteria, and from the growing acceptance of cannabis during the Vietnam War era to the accompanying backlash mandated by Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" antidrug campaign. Yet Abate soon makes obvious the importance of such detailed information to the politics of...

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