What should I read my son? The powerful forces of gender-specific marketing steer boys towards dinosaur, truck and superhero literature

He has maps, history and fiction, and some dubious books from my husband’s childhood, which all the counsel the perfect happiness of slotting into a Protestant ethic by the age of seven without faltering. Due to this, he technically knows how to manage a sawmill. But how can I complain? I was so drugged by Enid Blyton’s suburban politesse that I am still undoing the damage. The class system is everywhere is children’s fiction. It is all over Harry Potter. At least Dennis is an antidote to that.

But as with adults, so with children: there is poison. I hate the Usborne That’s Not My… series. That’s not my fairy, reads one; the fairy is then subjected to a blunt, and very unfair critique: “that’s not my fairy, her wings are too fluffy. That’s not my fairy, her hair too frizzy. That’s not my fairy, her crown is too smooth”. Her crown is too smooth? Others discuss the inadequacies of mermaids, unicorns, elves and even witches, as in ‘that’s not my witch, she isn’t hereto-normative enough?’

Young readers find no ecstasy, then, in these stories — what’s wrong with the fairy? — but only a nagging absence of something. It is the interior monologue of an unhappily married but prosperous woman, which is possibly why so many people buy them. It is literature to incite lack, and it is worse than advertising, because they are not buying a fairy, although if you read too many books like this, you will probably try. Books at least should have ambition, but these don’t; they are infant reading for tiny, soon-to-be unhappy capitalists.

Then there is the superhero genre, which was invented to make nerdy Jews feel better. It’s a genre of denial, a poke of an unhappy man with a stick. I disapprove, but I can’t hide them from him; there is just too much marketing. Every third child in our village is Iron Man, who should really be in psychoanalysis, and the rest are Spiderman, who I can’t bear to analyse for obvious reasons. (He spurts things).

My objections are stylistic, too: a punch is not a sentence. They make him violent and silent — like them — and it’s depressing when a book is completely outdone in characterisation and feeling by a film starring Lego people. Everyone, I tell him, knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. They just don’t tell him because they feel sorry for him because he doesn’t have any parents.

There are, among the dross, glorious things; but I worry that I appreciate them more than he does. Two of Julia Donaldson’s books are masterpieces: Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book and Tiddler, who single-handedly stopped my husband from eating (Little) Johnny Dory: such is the power of the word.

Charlie Cook tumbles into books. He reads a book in which a character reads a book; and in that book a character reads a book; and so on and on, and all back to Charlie Cook. Tiddler is — perhaps I had post-natal madness but I am sure that I am right — both a sophisticated rumination on the art of the novelist and a warning of the dangers of a life that is only lived in the imagination: a small, grey fish, a story-teller — a sort of fish Hilary Mantel — is so “trapped inside his story” he risks his life for dreaming. I adore Tiddler. I see him.

I really want him to read is fairy tales because of their protective magic. They prepare a child for a world of murder, cannibalism and cruelty: surely nothing can frighten a child who has imagined himself inside the gingerbread cottage? Fairy tales are older than gods we invented to protect ourselves from the very fears that they describe; and if you read fairy tales, I suspect, not much can harm you.

But something has happened to fairy tales since I read them. Their marketing has been polluted by the Disney genre: it plagiarised, painted pink, and destroyed. Fairy tale books look like Disney books and my son resists reading them because he thinks they are for girls; he sneers at Cinderella like an ugly sister in a Dennis wig. Gender-specific marketing is awful and profitable and it’s everywhere. It’s like Saudi Arabia in the children’s department. The violence he is offered — dinosaurs and trucks, and most horribly, a splicing of the two into dinotrucks (what?) — seems almost less awful.

He is willing to read subversions of fairy tales, which miss the point: why be something as dull as cynical at six, when you could travel into myth? He has The Three Little Superpigs and The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig and a Goldilocks parody whose title is too long to type but, since he does not know what he is supposed to be laughing at, how can he get the joke? I will try the Brothers Grimm on him. If I have to tear off the cover off, no matter.

Two things make me hopeful. I made him watch The Princess Bride and was pleased that, like the boy in the film hearing the story of the princess bride, he was initially repulsed by the kissing, but he stayed for the torture, and he loved it.

The other cause for hope is that we live in west Cornwall. There is a very specific mythology here, and it is celebrated in the stories we buy at the Edge of the World bookshop in Penzance, which has a Cornish myth section. We bought the story of Tom Bawcock, a legendary Mousehole man who went to fish in a storm because the village children were starving, and his cat Mouser, who subdued the storm with song.

If he can see the harbour in Mousehole where the village folk stood in the wind, lighting Tom Bawcock home, he will know the depth of the myths below and around him, all the way to the edges of the universe, and he will, perhaps, write his own myths; just dressed, for now, as Dennis the Menace.

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Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

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