Pop Culture
The greatest children’s books of the 21st Century
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They certainly reached for Brown Girl Dreaming. Woodson admits to having been stunned by the breadth of readers who got in touch after its publication in 2014. As she recalls, “I got letters from girls in India and white boys in the [American] South. I got letters from 60-year-old white men my grandfather had coached when they were boys playing baseball. Letters came in from women of all colours my age, and black and white girls as young as nine. So often, people said ‘I don’t know you and our lives are very different but you’re telling some part of my story here’.”
McNicoll, too, has found her fan mail enlightening, coming as it does from readers of all ages. “Schoolchildren write to me to say they love it. Adults have said they understand things more clearly. Doctors have told me their patients bring it with them, and a prison librarian told me a prisoner stole their library copy to hide it in their cell for comfort after checking it out to read over and over. That, I will never forget.”
The notion that children’s literature should truly be for everyone, regardless even of age, feels very of-the-moment in its boundaryless fluidity, yet it harks back to the past and a time when there was no such category as children’s writing. Consider Aesop’s Fables, among the oldest works on BBC Culture’s list: long popular with children, they were never actually intended for them.
Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest children’s books:
– The 100 greatest children’s books
– Why Where the Wild Things Are is the greatest children’s book
– The 20 greatest children’s books
– Who voted?
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