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You can't always judge a book by its cute cover
By Debbie Farmer
Sometimes children's books are not what you expected. Take, for example, the part in Little Red Riding Hood where the wolf gobbles up the grandmother and the woodsman frees her by carving up the wolf's stomach with an ax. Try explaining that to a 5-year-old who still worries about where his potty goes after he flushes the toilet.
The other day I bought my son a picture book with a fluffy bunny on the cover. I didn't read it first, since I spent four years in college analyzing English literature, and I figured that it was probably a story about a cute little bunny.
It was. Sort of. After all, it started out with bunny frolicking in a sunny meadow with his mommy. But by page seven my son was crying so hard he could barely see the pictures. How was I supposed to know that the bunny would get lost in the forest, fall into a raging river and be swept away, only to be saved in the nick of time by a helpful beaver? I consider this false advertising.
You would think that a children's book with a bunny on the cover would be a happy story, not a depressing diatribe about working through scary situations and facing the world on your own and all that.
It reminds me of the time I bought a book based on a popular cartoon character that was really, I suspect, a textbook for family life education. It started out with a group of kids setting a swarm of animated insects free to find mates so they could lay their eggs.
"What's a mate?" my then-6-year-old daughter asked.
"It's sort of like a really good friend." I continued to read.
"We have to make sure they cross the sea so they can have babies," the next page said.
"What has flying over the sea got to do with having babies?" My daughter narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
"Well," I said, "sometimes the stork might be busy so then you have to fly over the water to his nest and pick up the baby yourself."
"You have to fly there?" she asked.
"Yes." There was a long silence.
"How do you know how to get there?"
"They take a special plane."
I'm beginning to think that children's books need warnings for busy, tired parents. Nothing complicated, just a line or two so we don't naively pick up a picture book about a lost baby chipmunk as a light bedtime story, and end up explaining to a sobbing 4-year-old that Fuzzy was torn to bits by a pack of rabid hyenas.
I have vowed not to trust any cover, no matter how innocent it looks. Just yesterday my son brought home a new book with a cheery little monkey and a fire engine on the cover. I quickly snatched it out of his hands and hid it on top of the refrigerator.
"Hey, what are you doing?" my husband said. "That's a classic book from my childhood."
Now, you may think I'm overreacting. But believe me, I'm not fooled one bit.
Debbie Farmer is the author of 'Life in the Fast-Food Lane: Surviving the Chaos of Parenting'. Visit her website at: www.familydaze.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
