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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
The Perils of Re-reading a Book You Loved as a Child
You might find that you don’t love it after all
My re-reading of Harriet the Spy did not go as planned.
I had finally realized a childhood dream, and I thought that if I re-read the book I would be able to draw the lines connecting who I was in the fourth grade to who I am now.
It was going to be sunshine and roses and unicorns, with a rainbow thrown in.
After making my way through Book One, I had thought that I would breeze right though Books Two and Three, but I didn’t. There were long passages I had glossed over in my nine-year-old rush to find out what happened, and this time I read everything.
I found there were large swaths of the text my nine-year-old self had deemed unimportant or insufficiently relevant, and she had glossed right over them. My fifty-nine year-old self read every word only to find that at her best, Harriet was rude and insensitive. Even more distressing was the fact that ultimately, her bad behaviors were not punished, they were rewarded.
At the time of its publication, the book was panned for its “realism,” and if by “realism” you mean not-so-good people get rewarded for questionable and bad behaviors, then it…
