Suitable for Children, Written for Children and About Children -- are they the same thing?

[rj_anderson]

Okay, so this is what I was going to say in the other post I wrote out all nicely on my laptop and hadn't transferred over yet, but since snickelish asked about it I decided, heck with it, I'm just going to ramble and not try to write some big fancy essay-type thing

Comments

[persephone_kore]

Personally, I remember reaching the end of Anne of Green Gables and feeling disappointed that Anne was getting too grown up, and not wanting to read the sequels. I think I was eleven.

But at the same time, I would pretty regularly read stories about characters who were adults, so it's not like this was a uniform complaint. I think I just wanted more of Anne-as-she-was.

[rj_anderson]

That's because grown-up Anne was boring, IMO. She lost all her spunk and inventiveness and became Predictable.

[persephone_kore]

I hadn't read any of the other books at the time, so unless you mean she was getting boring toward the end of the very first book, I'm not sure that's quite it.... I think I felt disappointed and possibly betrayed that she appeared to be developing a romantic interest. Again, I didn't mind this in various other books. Maybe it was that in some ways I was expecting Anne to be (and stay) more like me. (It didn't bother me when, say, Amy in Little Women got toward growing up, but then, I didn't like or identify with her much when she was a kid. :P)

I enjoyed some of the grown-up Anne books when I did read them, but it was a few years later before I got around to circling back. There was one of them I remember being in hysterics over--I forget which, but I think it was the one where she wrote a lot of letters.

[rj_anderson]

Well, and to be fair, it's true that not all 8-12 year old girls are going to be interested in a romantic slant to their reading -- but then not every book is to the taste of every reader, regardless of age.

[persephone_kore]

That's the thing, though, I don't recall objecting to any other characters being older, grown up, or involved in romance. And I liked the rest of the book.

[persephone_kore]

I've enjoyed most of the books with Anne as an adult, except one thing that really grated on me: I hated Anne's passivity in Anne of Ingleside when Aunt Mary Maria was being such a pest. All of the excuses about "well, she's a relative of Gilbert's and we have to be polite" didn't cut any ice with me. Nor did the incident in which Anne briefly feels sorry for her because it's said of Mary Maria that she never had a friend in her life. The woman was a horrid old cow who made Anne's whole family miserable and ought to have been bounced out the door if she couldn't behave herself decently.

But I liked Anne of the Island---I know people want to strangle Anne for not loving Gilbert sooner (or not realizing she loved him) but it seemed quite real to me that love can be right in front of you and you don't see it at first. And Anne's House of Dreams was lovely as well.

Mary Anne