Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson (review)

'Every story begins with a "where"' (p. 2) writes Hudson in her introduction to this fascinating examination of the imaginative landscapes of children's fiction. Imaginative geography is, in these pages, a broad and generous term for that which is in the mind's eye: the writer provides starting points for the reader who then perceives the particulars of place and space through the prism of their own experience. This, as Hudson points out, applies equally to works of fantasy or realism, whether 'place' is territorial, emotional, environmental, or mythic. It may be bound to postcolonial concerns of otherness or notions of familiar and unfamiliar in, for example, the allure of the imaginary north, or the wide skies of steampunk narratives, or the garden, secret or otherwise, or the near 'non-humanocentricity' (p. 187) of the real-world geography of Deidre F. Baker's Becca at Sea. Or it may apply to those picture books that dispense with otherness altogether, instead locating the reader within and at home in the natural world of Indigenous myth. Linda Knowles, on the other hand, describes a Canadian literature in which 'the wilderness took the place of the Perilous Realm' until she, as a child, read The Golden Pine Cone and found what she most passionately desired: 'a world that was recognizably mine, my prosaic, everyday world, but that world transfigured, become numinous, my real woods a little enchanted' (p. 120).

Fourteen contributors focus on narratives from the northern hemisphere, including picture books, novels in diverse genres, and plays. They are grouped into four sections: 'Geographic Imaginaries: The Old World and the New', 'Gardens and Green Places', 'Fantasy Worlds and Re-enchantment', and 'Space and Gender' with reference to the works of English, Irish, and American writers as well as Canadian novelists such as Aaron Paquette and Eileen Kernaghan. Additional articles by three Canadian children's authors consider the very particular ways in which they have created imaged earth writing; as such the book provides insights for creative writers as well as scholars of children's literature. Some readers may look for maps: Peter Hynes acknowledges the significance of Ursula Le Guin's intricate map to her creative process at the start of his chapter on female places in Earthsea, and it might be argued that the physical maps found in some children's books warrant more attention for the pleasure they give young readers who can trace a story's territory with their fingers while contemplating the spaces in between named loci. On the other hand maps may limit an imaged earth reading. Hudson concludes that 'Characters have adventures that often include self-discovery, not because they are in the worlds the authors have created, but because they are of those worlds' (p. 22), and Alan Cumyn's reflections on the 'foggy land' (p. 314) of the writer's unconscious with its geography of feeling and memory provide a fitting postlude for this multi-faceted book.