No Kids Allowed: Children's Literature for Adults by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

Michelle Ann Abate's lively and entertaining monograph No Kids Allowed: Children's Literature for Adults ambitiously proposes to define a new genre in American literature: children's literature for adults. Abate contends that the recent trend of "adult-audience retellings of children's books," as Eric L. Tribunella has put it (qtd. in 5), actually represents "a new, growing, and vibrant genre" (5) that blurs the boundaries between adulthood and childhood. The monograph treats texts published in the US since the 1980s, and it asserts that because these texts adopt formats associated with and characters drawn from children's literature, they constitute "children's literature for adults." The book exhibits encyclopedic familiarity with American popular culture and fiction—comic books, fanfiction, partisan parody, and, of course, children's literature. It makes provocative connections between GLBTQ+ themes and religion, Dr. Seuss and the AIDS epidemic, and baby-shower books and the fetal personhood movement. And it offers readings that fuel discussion about the serious and silly ways in which adults interact with children's literature and culture. The claim is that a genre defined by audience can change that audience and still retain its identity. Abate acknowledges the paradox: "Children's literature for adults may seem like an oxymoronic and even nonsensical category, but it reveals how such unease and contradiction has always been the case. Children's literature … has never been a stable, 'pure,' or uncomplicated category" (25). Ultimately, the argument demands relinquishing the critical consensus that children's literature is defined by its primary audience. Children's literature is identified rather through literary style, format, and the current canon of classic children's books and authors. This redefinition is necessary to accept that adults might be the primary audience of children's books.

Abate has selected a range of recent books in different subgenres (picture books, comics, mystery series) that treat topics and themes of interest to adults: the indignities of old age, queer romance, experience of terrorism, parenting challenges. "Case studies" include Dr. Seuss's You're Only Old Once!; Mabel Maney's Nancy Drew parodies; Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers; Barbara Park's MA! There's Nothing to Do Here!; right- and left-wing political parodies adapted from beloved children's books such as Goodnight Moon; and bedtime books such as Go the F**k to Sleep. Each chapter situates its subject as a "children's book," defined as such because of its authorship, its style, its format, or some combination, and then connects the book and its adult concerns with an historical period, a political trend, or some other "literary implication … or cultural purpose." Abate then uses the connection to make the argument that children's literature for adults not only exists, but that it makes significant cultural interventions (28). Most importantly these books, in Abate's words, "invite us to reconsider the boundaries of age and audience on a scale that has arguably not occurred since children's literature itself was founded nearly three centuries ago" (193).

Chapter 1, "'A Book for Obsolete Children': Dr. Seuss's You're Only Old Once! and the Rise of Children's Literature for Adults," establishes the method Abate follows in all the subsequent chapters: a close reading of a key text and using that reading to connect the text with wider cultural phenomena. In Abate's reading, You're Only Old Once! not only treats the indignities of the elderly caught in the trammels of the US health-care system but also comments on the contemporaneous AIDS epidemic raging during 1986, when Seuss's book was published. Chapter 2, "Off to Camp: Mabel Maney's The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, and Fanfiction," asserts that Maney's Nancy Drew parodies acknowledge and exploit queer subtexts of the series—as slash fiction and other forms of fanfiction have long done with other franchises, such as Star Trek. Abate...