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conulyand getting smacked in the face with a gratuitous racial/ethnic slur.
Kid's book, public domain, naturally.
This right here is the reason that I almost never recommend books older than myself to people for their kids, and seriously de-emphasized "classic children's literature" with the nieces when they were young. Contemporary kidlit might still be problematic, sometimes very much so, but the author and publisher have usually considered that some of their readers might be put off by being blatantly told that people in whatever group all have whatever bad trait, or seeing certain words bandied about.
Of course, very nearly everybody else who recommends books for kids - including too many teachers and librarians - has a bad tendency to reach into their own childhood memories, and they get really defensive if you say that their cherished favorites just aren't all that. Published booklists are slowly getting better on this front, but personal recommendations really aren't. You'd think children's librarians, at least, would be better about this, but too often I've seen that they really aren't.
Kid's book, public domain, naturally.
This right here is the reason that I almost never recommend books older than myself to people for their kids, and seriously de-emphasized "classic children's literature" with the nieces when they were young. Contemporary kidlit might still be problematic, sometimes very much so, but the author and publisher have usually considered that some of their readers might be put off by being blatantly told that people in whatever group all have whatever bad trait, or seeing certain words bandied about.
Of course, very nearly everybody else who recommends books for kids - including too many teachers and librarians - has a bad tendency to reach into their own childhood memories, and they get really defensive if you say that their cherished favorites just aren't all that. Published booklists are slowly getting better on this front, but personal recommendations really aren't. You'd think children's librarians, at least, would be better about this, but too often I've seen that they really aren't.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-09 07:44 am (UTC)Well, it would do - I was of that target audience myself when I read them!
Her education in history and anthropology not only allowed her to write convincingly of Neolithic and Bronze-Age societies, but she was “woke” from the prejudices of the day. Many of her stories were set in the era following the “Burn-off,” a nuclear war that decimated the northern hemisphere… so it was the shall-we-say darker races which represented humanity among the stars, and white Europeans & Anglo-Saxons were so rare as to invite comment.
That was downright subversive in the 1950s! Yet she drew no particular attention to it, and kids reading the stories took it in as a matter of course.