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Alison Lurie
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Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter Kindle Edition

by Alison Lurie (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
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Are some of the world's most talented children's book authors essentially children themselves? In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie considers this theory, exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them, including Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and Wizard of Oz author Frank Baum, as well as Dr. Seuss and Salman Rushdie. Analyzing these and many others, Lurie shows how these gifted writers have used children's literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia, and the struggles of their own experiences.
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  1. Print length
    244 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  5. Publication date
    December 31, 2002
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. File size
    596 KB
  8. Page Flip
    Enabled
  9. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A perceptive critic, Lurie (Don't Tell the Grown-Ups) has long been a close observer of children's literature. This welcome volume collects a number of her essays on the subject, most of which appeared in other versions in the New York Review of Books. As she wittily deconstructs the lives and works of authors as varied as Louisa May Alcott ("she was the daughter of what would now be described as vegetarian hippie intellectuals, with fringe religious and social beliefs, and spent nearly a year of her childhood in an unsuccessful commune"), Hans Christian Andersen, J.K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss, a common theme emerges, for Lurie contends that those who write best for children are "in some essential way... children themselves." James Barrie liked to play pirates and Indians; Babar author Laurent deBrunhoff climbed trees into his 70s and John Masefield's daughter described him as "a wonderful playmate - essentially, another child." Children's book authors may bristle at this assertion, as well as at Lurie's somewhat offhand dismissal of the art of children's literature. Speaking of "established authors" who try their hand at writing for children, for instance, she notes "they are as it were on vacation, and under no pressure to produce a Great Work." Still, the essays are consistently entertaining, enlightening and erudite, and Lurie's insights into a host of classic titles, including such topics as gender role reversal and social satire in the Oz books, the enduring power of symbolism in fairy tales and changing literary tastes over the past two centuries, bring clarity to an always-evolving form.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In clear, lively, unpretentious style, Lurie writes serious literary criticism about the best children's books, classic and contemporary. Most of these 14 essays first appeared in the New York Review of Books, and as in her first collection, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups (1990), she talks to adults about the stories and how they reflect the changing image of childhood. This time she also focuses on the writers' own lives and what their stories say about their growing up or not wanting to grow up. In a great piece on J. K. Rowling (a "folktale heroine," once a welfare mother, who "has clearly now become a fabulously rich princess"), Lurie places Harry Potter in the honorable tradition--from Tom Sawyer to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz--where the child characters are neither perfect nor obedient, and it's not always easy to distinguish the adult ogre from the helpful giant. Neither condescending nor preachy, this is for parents, teachers, children's literature students, and for any reader who wonders why some stories are always with us. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002TZ3ERA
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (December 31, 2002)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 31, 2002
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 596 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 244 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 12 ratings

About the author

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Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie

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Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she joined the English department at Cornell University in 1970, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others. Her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. It was followed by the well-received The Nowhere City (1966) and The War Between the Tates (1974). In 1984, she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Her most recent novel is The Last Resort (1998). In addition to her novels, Lurie’s interest in children’s literature led to three collections of folk tales and two critical studies of the genre. Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continues to teach and write. In 2012, she was awarded a two-year term as the official author of the state of New York. Lurie lives in Ithaca, New York, and is married to the writer Edward Hower. She has three grown sons and three grandchildren.

Customer reviews

3.3 out of 5 stars
3.3 out of 5
12 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Kaeli Vandertulip
3.0 out of 5 stars Not her strongest work
Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2008
Children's literature can be examined from many different angles: what do the stories say about the mores of the time, what can we learn about the characters from their creators, how have these stories been received? Lurie's gift as an author is that she can present all of these ideas together to give a well-rounded look at children's literature and the authors who write it. Or, at least, she could do this in her last book, Don't Tell the Grown Ups. Something happened between that book and this.

Boys and Girls Forever examines several children's authors and their backgrounds, the stories they popularized, and their characters. Lurie also examines fairy stories, poetry, children's games, and illustrations. Unlike Don't Tell the Grownups, Boys and Girls forever is weakly written and disorganized. Lurie occasionally gives overviews of the author's works (juvenile and adult) and sometimes gives in-depth histories of the authors, but without the same intrigue she managed in her previous book. She continues to have glaring omissions in the authors she considers (still not Twain, Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Judy Blume, EB White). But even the ones she includes are desperatly lacking. Her essay on Dr. Seuss is one of the weakest I've read. She approached the authors in her last book with the same kind of passion children approach their works with. The only one she came even close to doing this with was Frank Baum. But her Dr. Seuss piece felt like filler. Actually, most of the book felt like filler. There's no common thread for the stories of these authors. I thought she was going to discuss the child-like mind these authors had to have, but she only rarely shoves in some mention of their minds as she writes.

The last chapters not about a certain author were weak, felt tacked on, and didn't continue any theme. It's as if she got a call from her editor and was told she needed more chapters and she knew she wasn't going to write another book on children's lit, so she threw in something weak about play, pictures, and fairy tales. It weakened her theme irreparably. Furthermore, her books would greatly benefit from illustrations-she loosely describes images from books, especially picture books, but without a familiarity of the actual work, her descriptions are not sufficient enough for the reader to visualize the pictures.

This book seemed cobbled together and less impassioned than Don't Tell the Grownups. If Don't Tell the Grown-Ups was Lurie's final term paper, Boys and Girls Forever was the grade she knew the professor was going to drop. She needed to find a theme and stick to it.
7 people found this helpful
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Manola Sommerfeld
5.0 out of 5 stars Your favorite childhood books, deconstructed!
Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2005
I just finished this, and loved it, loved it, loved it! Alison Lurie, besides being a great novelist, teaches Children's Literature at Cornell. This book "deconstructs" classics such as Little Women, The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte's Web, etc, with such acute observations that it was a great joy to read. Of course the book talks about Harry Potter and the criticism it has received from certain religious circles. This is not new in children's lit: The Wizard of Oz suffered the same kind of stigma. It was interesting to read how nothing is new in the realm of religious intolerance.

One of the chapters about which i was most conflicted was the one dealing with illustrations. Lurie acknowledges that it would be disingenous to expect fairy tales without pictures. However, images steal away from the imagination development that kids would enjoy otherwise. I read a fairytale a million years ago, where the princesses wore dresses "the color of time". I vividly remember the internal debate i had in my head trying to decide what color time would be (i settled on pearl grey). Pictures would not have given me that mental gymnastics. In a sense, i believe that fantasy is like gymnastics for the mind of a little one. Reality is what you see every day. Fantasy is what you need to come to terms as you grow up. To carry on a mental fight trying to reconcile what is real and what is fiction is a valuable exercise for a developing mind. And besides, adults are always available for "reality checks".
7 people found this helpful
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L.S. Jaszczak
5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and informative
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2006
I was very impressed with Ms. Lurie's previous book, Don't Tell the Grownups, because she recognized and applauded the inherent subversion of great children's literature. I would have chucked any book that the anti-Harry Potter forces liked, with namby-pamby characters who ALWAYS followed the rules - straight into the donation bin - only because I NEVER throw books in the garbage. This book picks up on the same theme, showing that books such as Little Women, which are considered "sweet and sentimental" today, were actually quite radical for the time they were written. She also looks at the lives of the authors and the influences on them. I certainly never realized that L. Frank Baum's wife and mother-in-law were outspoken feminists, which probably explains the presence of so many strong female characters in his work, sometimes to the detriment of the males.

The book also has chapters on a few authors with whom I have no acquaintance but whose work I might be interested in checking out someday, as well as several interesting essays on subjects such as playground lore, illustrators of children's books, and poetry by and for children.
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Top reviews from other countries

Mrs. M. Fowler
3.0 out of 5 stars Boys and Girls forever
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 1, 2013
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Not enough books/writers covered; too much in the way of summaries instead of crits. Too much on one writer whereas more authors should have been covered.
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ed
4.0 out of 5 stars Boys and Girl Forever
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 15, 2003
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Alison Lurie supports the statement that, the authors who write most successfully for children write not as an adult talking to a juvenile audience, but as the child in themselves. Surely this is the secret behind the internationally stardom achieved by Hans C. Andersen, Louisa M. Alcott, L. Frank Baum, J.K. Rowling and many others discussed in this book. Lurie explores some significant aspects of the lives of the writers whose books are still popular today, but also of others, such as Walter de la Mare and John Masefield now considered old-fashioned by many contemporary critics.
In each short chapter dedicated to a writer, Lurie gives fascinating aspects of their life and, in some instances, she makes a connection with their literary work. We learn about L. Frank Baum’s emancipated female’s characters in his Wizard of Oz books, inspired by Matilda Gage, his mother in law who was an active member of the feminist movement and who encouraged Baum to send his first manuscript to the publishers.
Other chapter explores the Moomintroll books by Finish author Tove Jansson where Lurie makes and interesting comparison to the Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories; The are also whole chapters dedicated to the Dr Seuss’ books; Harry Potter; Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Other sections deal particularly with fairy tales, children’s games, poetry and illustrations in children’s books. Disappointedly enough this last section is mainly devoted to illustrators of fairy tales and predominantly on Maurice Sendak and does not give a balanced perspective of the work of many artist, such as, Tenniel, Shepard, Garth Willimans, Gorey and many others who would have deserved, at least, an acknowledgement. This chapter would have also benefited by the inclusion of black and white or colour illustrations. On the other hand, we should realise that these articles are ‘reflections on children’s classic’ and don’t intend to be a comprehensive study on the subject.
This is a work of scholarly study on a subject that has been written abundantly in the past. Lurie needs to be praised for bringing into life unknown aspects of these authors and to give update information in line with the most recent biographical and critical studies carried out on the subject. The author makes reference to American and English edition of the books and there are many other international classics that have not being covered here, nevertheless the selection is significant and it offers an interesting insight into the books studied and the lives of the writes mentioned. There is a comprehensive bibliography of primary and of secondary sources of books and journals that the author has consulted in writing this book.
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Mrs. K. A. Wheatley
4.0 out of 5 stars A great place to start rediscovering children's literature
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2009
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Lurie, a Professor of English Literature at Cornell, takes the opportunity to present a series of essays on children's classic literature ranging from discussions of Harry Potter to the works of Walter De La Mare. The work is eminently readable and strikes a balance between talking about the author, their life, their critical reception and their philosophies, and the works themselves. There is a good balance here between European, English, Scandinavian and American literature which works very well.

Lurie's style, despite her fearsome academic references is not intimidating at all and these are quite chatty, informal essays which even a rank novice to the world of children's literature could take on board with ease. She is clearly passionate about her subject and her interest and enthusiasm shines through.

One of the most interesting things for me is that Lurie is an American and her knowledge of the genre of her own country's writers is naturally more comprehensive. Her essays on Alcott and Frank L. Baum spring to mind in particular. Her writing on English writers is not deficient by any means and she has some thought provoking things to say, but there are little gaps in her knowledge which show up, particularly in her chapter on childhood games in the playground. She is the first to acknowledge this, and I don't raise it as a criticism, more as an observation.

I think the weakest of her chapters is on Tove Jansson's Moomintroll books, which feels rather rushed and unfinished in places. The result as a whole though is a fascinating book which is well written, well balanced and should be of interest to anyone who is in the process of rediscovering children's literature as an adult.
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