Welcome Lorna! I loved Sendak's book, too - a lovely one to use with children with worries about anger.
Potter is, indeed, quite unflinching re Peter's fate if caught by Mr McGregor! What IS it with these books which have animals all dressed up and living in houses and doing laundry and suchlike, as well as being eaten by humans! Quite a complicated suspension of disbelief and resumption of normal rationality for wee ones. I guess they do that all the time, do they not, in that all the world is potentially magical...
Tuck Everlasting, Larry? Is that the farther adventures of a beatified, transmogrified, Friar tuck? LOL.
Dlowan: that was a briliiant digression thread on the WITW you had going on at Abuzz in 2001 Everybody: it started with Dlowan wondering about the characters in The Wind in the Willows, and turned into a discussion about Alice in Wonderland. I was amazed at the different perceptions people had about Carroll's book. As a child I got right into the fantasy, and could relate to its vivid dreaminess, since my dreams were/(are) quite strange and vivid also.
dlowan wrote:
Quite a complicated suspension of disbelief and resumption of normal rationality for wee ones. I guess they do that all the time, do they not, in that all the world is potentially magical...
.
That's the wonderful thing about kids, their ability to go back and forth from magic to reality, though I think they believe in those magical possibilities as being real, until around 8 or 9, or whenever someone tells them not to believe. I think that the stronger a child's sense of magic has been, the more lively their creative imaginations will be as they get older.
Dlowan, I take your point, but as you said still scary, lol
.[/quote]I think that the stronger a child's sense of magic has been, the more lively their creative imaginations will be as they get older.[/quote]
I agree, dream2020...
...and I also liked Tuck Everlasting, now that it's been mentioned....
Lorna
dlow - Tuck Everlasting: 10 year old Winnie is daydreaming about running away when she meets the Tuck family, who have found a spring that may give them eternal life, but if you drink it when you're 10, you'll remain 10 (forever?) and never grow up. Winnie learns a lot about life and death and eternity and eventually makes some hard choices. A great story by Natalie Babbitt.
Sounds good - the thinking child's Peter Pan!
Who has really read the original Peter Pan? - not the shortened/bowdlerized/Disney film pap that is fed to kiddies all too often - 'tis a passing strange and neurotic thing, quite creepy when you read it with adult eyes - weird fellow, JM Barrie - but a very interesting book - and, if one has the Rackham illustrations! Oy veh!
Did anyone else read "The Princess and Curdie" series - or the wonderful "The Cuckoo Clock" and "At the Back of the North Wind"? truly magical things - I especially loved the cuckoo!
In fact, it inspired me to buy a cuckoo clock, which, sadly, broke down when I left home and had me feller over most nights.
After a month, he said brokenly to me, would I mind stopping the cuckoo when he was there? It was not so much, he said, the demented cuckooing of the thing, but the way it slammed its door when it had finished. I locked the cuckoo inside its door when he was there.....then, a week or two later, he said, haggardly, would I mind letting the cuckoo wind down completely, since, now, when it tried to cuckoo, it went "COOK" - then banged its head violently on the door - cuckBANG, cuckBang, cuckBang. I stopped pulling the cuckoo weight up to wind it, but without the cuckoo, the clock broke its heart, and died....
<writing down names of kiddie books to get at the library>
poor cuckoo[/I]
Must admit to not having read the original Peter Pan myself but mom read it to me when I was very young.
And I must admit to a bias against Walt & Co., since he sent out anti John F. Kennedy propaganda in California in 1960. Walt did not want a Catholic to be president - kind of puts the the Mickey Mouse Club in a bad place.
dlowan, always liked pooh. am mortified by the disnification of the hapless little bear.
And that is but a wee bit of the horror story -down to bad pay and insanitary costumes for Disney critters at Disneyland this very day and age!
The only Rackham-illustrated Peter Pan I could find at the library was Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Bears little resemblance to the Peter Pan I remember. Beautiful illustrations. I'm trying to figure out the differences between the various Peter Pan books. I guess Barrie wrote a play called Peter Pan, Kensington Gardens came a few years later.
Today's Refdesk Thought of the Day:
"Children don't read to find their identity. They don't read to free themselves of gult, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology. They detest sociology. They still believe in good, the family , angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation and other such obsolete stuff."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
dlowan, pooh is now being marketed as a juice, heavily sugared crap with the disnified drawing of the a.a. milne cahracters. the oriigianl pooh illustrations had some character and life to them. now pooh on juice products in unbearabley ( no pun intended ) cute. feh.
Feh indeed!I LOVE the Shepherd illustrations...
Larry - perhaps I am misremembering - I have a friend who had what I thought was the original Peter Pan with Rackham's illustrations, but perhaps it was the other one? I must check with her...
Larry, I like the quote too, though I have to admit that I never met a kid that believed in punctuation, unless it was the exclamation point.
Pooh juice indeed.
I could a tale unfold.....but I will not.
Be aware that what Americans call "poop" is called "pooh" in Britain and Oz - does the name "pooh juice" have the same awful implications for you folk?
