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Genres are a strange construct. We create them for music and books, but do they place us at a disadvantage? When it comes to music, I've heard songs that sound more like rap or pop but are labeled country. How many listeners who do not prefer country will simply skip that song without even listening to it? How much do we miss out by placing labels on things?
I see this happening with adults and children's books. Children's books have lessons for adults. Thanks to reading children's books as an adult, I felt a jolt that transported me out of my jaded attitude. I started to realize that my life, too, held the promise of wonder, that all things could be possible, whether in a fantasy story or in my contemporary day-to-day existence.
Children's books taught me when I was young to put my faith in hope, and I was lucky enough to reconnect to it when I was in my 30s, bringing with it a renewed sense of curiosity about the world around me.
When you read children's books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.
Children's books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure.
But in order to experience wonder, one has to be open to receiving it. As adults, we are mired in the real world of grownups, with bills to pay, careers to have, and the stress of living with multiple expectations like social, vocational, familial and financial obligations. Where do we find wonder in our daily lives? Where do we run up against something or someone that inspires in us a sense that everything is possible?
If we are going to channel that same reaction to wonder that we had as children, we must set aside the rules, labels and genres we think life must operate under. We need to prime ourselves to look at and experience our world through fresh eyes, to accept the inspiration that wonder creates, to brave the scary thought that anything -- safe or otherwise -- could happen. To seek wonder is to be vulnerable, to risk hurt and pain, to go beyond the logic of the world we know, to chance that we'll run up against evil.
So how do we recapture wonder as adults? One way to experience wonder is through the power of literature. Speculative fiction -- an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and horror -- thrives on creating a feeling of wonder in readers both young and adult. Similarly, magical realism and fabulism can spark wonder in their fans. For sure, there is no shortage of wonder in books for adults.
Revisiting children's books as an adult involves opening up your mind to explore the world in new ways. The danger in that is recognizing the lack of wonder in your own life. But if you'll chance it, you might also find that finding wonder will inspire you to go after your dreams from younger years and believe that anything is possible.
Book of the week!
If you are going to read one book, give this one a try...
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
(New adult fiction: historical fiction, Civil War era) ~ 304 pages
In a nutshell: Set in West Virginia during and after the Civil War, Phillips' book takes as given that slavery was evil and the war a necessity, focusing instead on lives torn apart by the conflict and on the period's surprisingly enlightened approach toward care of the mentally ill.
The novel's pitch-perfect voice belongs to ConaLee, observant and loving but also a scrappy survivor. Initially, ConaLee knows only that she was born in 1861 after her father "went away" and that her mother loves books. When a frightening man shows up years later calling himself "Papa," ConaLee assumes he's her father. He is not, but he stays and tyrannizes ConaLee's mother until she suffers mental and physical collapse. Then he dumps now 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and disappears.
Here readers' assumptions about 19th-century psychiatric care are tested. The asylum's founder follows the real-life Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride's theory of "moral treatment," which included empathetic compassion on the part of the staff along with activity and fresh air for the patients. His humane approach was accepted, even prevalent in its day. Here, the asylum becomes the catalyst for characters to uncover identities lost, hidden, or unknown.
ConaLee's lineage, revealed piecemeal, exemplifies a complex world in which names change, sometimes more than once. Her mother grew up the daughter of a plantation owner. He disapproved of the boy she loved because he was supposedly "shack Irish," the nephew of the girl's Irish nursemaid. The nursemaid kept secret that he was not her relation but a slave's half-Black orphan.
Fleeing to Appalachia in 1861, the young lovers married under an assumed name before ConaLee's father joined the Union Army. After surviving a head wound in battle, he lost all memory of his past and started a new life with a new name.
Expect coincidences and convolutions, but Phillips pulls them off with gorgeous prose, attention to detail and masterful characters.
Bottom line: Haunting storytelling and a refreshing look at history.
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Vince Giordano has been the librarian and director of the Juniata County Library since 2015.