The Courage to Imagine: The Child Hero in Children's Literature by Roni Natov (review)

Natov, professor of English at Brooklyn College and founding editor of the scholarly journal The Lion and The Unicorn, explores the idea that literature for children encourages children to imagine, with the child both as the hero of the story and its reader. Using a host of examples from historical and contemporary texts, she provides a framework for imagination as two parts: the pastoral, "a sheltered space where freshness and truth can be preserved" that grows creativity, and the dark pastoral, too, as a place to give validity and purpose to feelings of fear, anger, and despair. Natov pulls from a variety of children's and young adult books, including Dahl's Matilda, Myers' Monster, and Selznick's The Inventions of Hugo Cabret, to explore how diversity and difference, trauma, empathy, politics, and identity in literature can encourage young readers to engage with experiences both similar to and different from their own.