For me, this book didn't live up to its title. Sure, it's kind of about "the subversive power of children's literature," but it's actually mostly about the biographies of certain children's authors and how certain children's stories are archetypes for adult literary fiction. And it's not a cohesive book at all. It's a series of essays that were probably originally intended for lit crit mags. When Lurie does address subversiveness, it's usually historical (the book was published in 1990, so I didn't expect nearly every essay to be about Victorian social norms).

I wanted this book to address a subject that really interests me, which is the way some kids books intentionally guide their readers toward a certain way of thinking. I was actually hoping this book would be a better version of my college seminar paper, which was about how Disney movies paved the way for gay rights. Oh well. ( )

Lurie points out interesting ways of interpreting classics of children's literature, and illuminates some of the personalities behind famous books. For instance, I didn't know the author of Peter Pan was himself preternaturally young, possibly suffering from a condition that prevented him from completing puberty. Many of the most popular children's tales are subversive and flout tradition, rules and, most importantly, parental authority. ( )

A little dated and a little dry (academic) but still interesting. Some of the essays speak about universality of the themes of children's stories, or the need of children for them; other essays focus on a particular author, usually emphasizing one work but mentioning the others. ( )

In the Introduction, Lurie explains her thesis that a lot of the most beloved characters in children’s literature are not the kind of role models most people would want their children to look up to. For example, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn lie, cheat, steal, skip school, etc. In The Secret Garden, Mary and Colin spend the majority of their time trying to fool the adults around them about what they’re really doing. Harry Potter is too recent to have been included in this book, but he breaks rules repeatedly, convinces Hermione to let him copy her homework, etc. None of these are behaviors that we particularly want our children to emulate, yet well-behaved characters rarely make literary history.

This concept sounded extremely interesting to me, and I assumed that the rest of the chapters would focus on how individual authors wrote subversive characters and how they affected children and society. Unfortunately, Lurie did everything but that throughout the rest of the book. Her essays focused almost entirely on the biographical information of each author, the plots of one of their books, and unsupported suppositions about how the author’s life is represented in their books (i.e. this character is representative of the author’s overbearing father). Lurie is supposed to be a serious literary critic, but since her claims about how the authors’ lives were represented in their books didn’t cite any outside sources and very little textual evidence, I had trouble taking her seriously. The book simply didn’t contain any useful information after the introduction, and I suspect it contained some downright wrong information.

Another problem was that more than half of the book was spent discussing adult literature (like Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shardik by Richard Adams, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Once and Future King by T.H. White). In addition, she only had four chapters on well-known children’s authors (Beatrix Potter, James Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and A.A. Milne). The other children’s authors she writes about, while they may be historically important to the genre, were not well-known enough to be included in a book this short (just over 200 pages). There were just so many other, better authors she could have included (Beverly Cleary, Judy Bloom, Ronald Dahl, and Gertrude Chandler Warner are a few who come to mind).

Basically, it looked like Lurie took a bunch of essays that she had written earlier (and many of the chapters in this book had been published as individual essays elsewhere) and wrote an introduction to try to link them together, regardless of whether they actually work together under the theme she chose or not. I think this is the first time I’ve ever felt disgusted with a book. The only reasons I gave it two stars instead of one is that the introduction presented a great concept and that there weren’t actual (verifiable) mistakes in the book. ( )

This book has been on my "Find and Read" list for ages with nary a sniff of it appearing. I began to wonder if it actually existed at all but then trippped over it at Wellesley Booksmith and grabbed it up. However, it was not what I expected at all. I still found it interesting but I expected to learn more about children's literature in general and less about specific authors and also why adults would read it. Perhaps I just don't know what literary criticism is.