Anxious about school, the eponymous pigeon states, “What if I learn too much!?! My head might pop off.” (The book itself poses no such risk.) The pigeon’s solution, after many pages of exclamation — he screeches “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!” when he sees the school bus, for example — is to articulate the actual activities he will do at school and to realize that school isn’t some amorphous bogeyman. 

This is classic cognitive behavioral therapy — it’s decatastrophizing, performed on a pigeon. To be fair, this can be a useful technique for anxiety management. But why is it almost all that this book has to offer? There’s no vocabulary my daughter, at age 3, doesn’t know; there’s no syntax she doesn’t already utilize. The book eschews conventional written dialogue for speech bubbles — there’s not even a “the pigeon screeched” following his “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!”  

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We see much of the same in other current best sellers, and in the young-reader books favored by many schools as the new academic year gets underway. The language is colloquial to an extreme. In Dragons Like Tacos (483 weeks on the Times list), a book that was also read at my daughter’s school, the narrator states, “Hey dragon, why do you guys like tacos so much?” In On the First Day of Kindergarten (two weeks on the list), we hear, “On the first day of kindergarten, I thought it was so cool riding the school bus to my school!” In The Smart Cookie (29 weeks on the list), which often reads like a therapist’s version of a child’s inner monologue, the titular cookie states, “I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing my ideas. I didn’t feel like a smart cookie.”

A few of these titles attempt a poeticism that falls short. “You did this job in your very own way. We needed a tough little truck today,” we read in Time for School, Little Blue Truck (44 weeks on the list). In the Magical Yet (7 weeks on the list), a story about a child attempting to learn a variety of new skills like bike riding (its cadences apparently and notably adopted from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go), we hear, “And now you won’t ride. No way. Not never. No riding for you, you’ll walk … forever.” It had seemed that at the end of those ellipses, we might encounter something more … complex. But alas, we don’t. 

Half of the 10 children’s picture books on the current Times list are about going to school. Four of those involve ways of managing the anxiety that might attend school. Five of the titles are focused on boosting the self-esteem of their readers. Even the potentially mythical Dragons Love Tacos is about a commonplace event — a taco party. (This is, in fairness, a source of its humor, lest I begin to sound too cantankerous.)

That is to say, this list, thematically, is extremely narrow. Diction-wise, syntactically, these books are even more so. These are books that meet my 3-year-old right where she is and take her no further. Though seemingly emotional (“And the STUFF!… There is sooooooooo much stuff to learn!” the pigeon wails), they relate, really, to a small fraction of her emotional life. They have very little of beauty, philosophy, morality, or character (unless the expression of anxiety counts). 

There is a particularly extreme counterexample to this to be found in The New England Primer, the primer of choice for more than a century of American teachers. First published in 1690, it was used regularly in classrooms until the mid-19th century. In a 1727 edition, children were marched right from the alphabet to vocabulary lists featuring words like “glory,” “absent,” “drunkenness,” “impudent,” and “fidelity,” and from there onto to the tale of the martyrdom of John Rogers, in which, “his wife, with nine small children, and one at her breast, followed him to the stake; with which sorrowful sight, he was not in the least daunted; but with wonderful patience, died courageously, for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

With the pressing concern of salvation came high expectations. For their souls’ sake, children needed to distinguish the “abominable” (another vocabulary word) from the beautiful. (“What is God?” the primer states. “God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, in his Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and Truth.”)  

I’m not suggesting we return to The New England Primer. But it’s clear that children can and should be introduced to diction, syntax, and concepts far beyond what is in much of our children’s literature today. I believe it is what they want. (My daughter often asks me, “When are we going to die?”)

After The New England Primer, children’s school primers grew increasingly simplified.  In the early 20th century, the rise of the “Look-Say” method, which advocated against phonics and for whole-word memorization using very simple vocabulary lists, culminated in the mind-numbingly repetitive Dick and Jane primers. Kids reared on these texts were forced to endure sentences like: “Jane said, ‘Run, run. Run, Dick, run. Run and see.’” 

In response to the outcry against these primers, William Spaulding, Theodore Geisel’s editor, commissioned the book that would become The Cat in the Hat. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down,” Spaulding said, supplying Geisel (whose pen name was Dr. Seuss) with a list of the 348 simple words he was allowed to use — the Look-Say method, but fun. And it was. “It is fun to have fun/ But you have to know how,” says the Cat in the Hat. “I can hold up the cup/ And the milk and the cake!” It was more than fun — it was explosively popular. To date, The Cat in the Hat has sold more than 16 million copies; it continues to sell about half a million copies a year. It is often thought of as the quintessential children’s book.  

But we should think of The Cat in the Hat not as the quintessential children’s book, but as the quintessential children’s reader — a book a child can pick up when she begins to read on her own. In this, it is remarkable — energetic and comic and magically formed of the simplest words. Unfortunately, the popularity of Seuss enshrines simplicity as the central virtue of children’s literature, and this behemoth has come to swallow up all other possibilities. We also need a subgenre of children’s literature that feels more like literature.

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In childhood, our minds work differently. Children can learn multiple languages simultaneously without the enormous effort adults must put forth to achieve often worse results. This should also be the period in which they hear elevated language:  beautiful, beguiling, weighty, humorous — a version of adult language. It would be so much more effortlessly and naturally acquired than at any other time, and it, too, could be theirs — if only we’d read them the books that would bring it to them.   

There are books like this, even if they seem too hard to find. One notable example can be found in the works of William Steig, a near-contemporary of Seuss. One of Steig’s classics, Amos and Boris, tells the tale of a mouse on a sea journey: “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he [Amos] marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water. Lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.” 

Like The New England Primer, Steig’s work doesn’t shy away from the ultimate questions of life and of meaning, though here there are no clear answers. Treading water in a deep ocean, we read, Amos “began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?” There is characterization and deep emotion. Amos is eager and temperamental; Boris, the whale who arises from deep in the ocean to rescue him, is practical and purposeful. They become fast friends. They cry when the inevitable occurs — Amos must live his life on land, and Boris in the ocean.  

Children are born into a sea of mysterious signals; it is in their nature to decode the strange world before them. Why, when we begin to read to them, do we so often present them with the little they already know? We should trust them, more often, with complexity in their literature. What they can’t yet grasp, they will grow to understand. There should be, off in the distance, at least a few of those luminous whales.

Even before Chapter One, the dedication of the first book, A Bad Beginning, sets the tone: “To Beatrice — darling, dearest, dead.” In these books, to say nothing of the dedicatee, villains (and not just villains) are burned to ash or poisoned, devoured by swarms of leeches and eviscerated with circular saws. Handler’s protagonists, the three orphaned Baudelaire children, are pursued through the novels by the evil monobrowed Count Olaf, who is determined to get his hands on the vast fortune which will be settled on them when 14-year-old Violet reaches the age of majority.

Each novel — each of the first seven, at least; it gets more complicated after that — sees the children taken into the care of a new guardian. Count Olaf turns up in a hopeless disguise that the children see through instantly but that inexplicably fools all the adults (shades, here, of Peter Sellers in Lolita). He hatches a plot, is thwarted and — when at last the dozy adults tumble to his disguise — escapes to scheme another day.

And Count Olaf — who physically punches a child in book one — is nasty. One of the glorious things about Lemony is the way in which, contra a whole history of fluffy bunnies, kindly bears and amiable ducks, his books tap into the appetite for the gruesome, violent and macabre which — much as adults who fetishise childhood innocence would prefer otherwise — are absolutely a feature of the childish imagination.

In doing so, he plays with the very traditions of children’s literature itself. The established tropes, in Handler’s work, are knowingly burlesqued — not least the orphan protagonists. Lots of children in children’s stories are orphans (it’s a convenient way to get the parents out of the way so adventures can be had; Roald Dahl, outstandingly, had James, of Giant Peach fame, orphaned when his parents were eaten by a rhinoceros), but Handler makes their orphanhood the centre of the story.

The very first line of his first book tips the hat to a narrative convention, too: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” Throughout the work this narrator (of whose ill-starred personal life hints are from time to time dropped) makes forlorn attempts to dissuade his readers from continuing. Here, of course, Lemony Snicket exploits the fact that, as Mrs Bluebeard knew all too well, warning someone off something makes it twice as attractive.

We’re still working, as Handler recognises, through the legacy of a series of dramatic, centuries-long swerves in how children were understood, and how that understanding was expressed in writing for and about them. It’s a swerve between insisting children are “innocent” or encouraging them to be so — and recognising that they are nothing of the sort. Look at your sweet little 10-year-old, face in his phone… are you entirely confident that he’s not Googling “100 most gruesome funny deaths”?

Children are drawn to the dark, the sadistic and the cruel. Nothing makes a child laugh harder than a cartoon character being hit in the face with a frying pan or flattened by an anvil. We know, proverbially, what wanton boys do to flies; and children have always been a large part of the appetite for gruesome and prurient sensation literature. Who can forget that lovely joke in Tom Stoppard’s script for Shakespeare in Love, when we encounter a boy (the young John Webster), who says how much he loved Titus Andronicus: “I loved it when they cut heads off, and the daughter mutilated with knives…”?

The improving, inspiring, cosseting mainstream of children’s writing tends inadvertently to affirm that side of childhood — even as, anxiously, it seeks to occlude it. The Puritans, who took the lead in the 17th century, may have been onto something when they saw children as, if not uniquely evil, at least uniquely in danger of damnation. The doctrine of original sin meant that you started life with red on the ledger, so children’s stories had work to be getting on with. One notorious example was the nonconformist preacher James Janeway’s 1671 A Token for Children: Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives, and joyful deaths of several young children. The idea, here, was to scare children into repenting their sins before it was too late.

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The funny thing is that A Token for Children has, these days, a faint Lemony Snicket vibe. Read at this distance it’s a riot, with pre-teen after pre-teen going tearfully and gratefully to his or her maker, warning parents and schoolmates with their dying breath to repent: “O make use of time to get Christ for your souls; spend no time in running up and down in playing.” Janeway was deadly serious. But Handler and his like exorcise that religious pathology as arch laughter — history repeating itself as farce.

What makes such campery possible is that between then and now we had a long period, which really takes off with the Romantics, in which the pendulum swung the other way. As Wordsworth put it, “heaven lay about me in my infancy”. Rather than being tainted with sin, children were now moral superheroes, paragons, holy innocents: a rebuke to the fallen grown-up world. That, too, was an adult projection — and, if anything, more fanciful a one than that idea that they’re damned from the get-go.

To this day, we can’t quite make up our minds about children, and out of the cognitive dissonance emerges anxiety — and laughter. It’s a knowing double-standard that the likes of Handler cheerfully skip back and forth on.

As has always been the case, for instance, the most fervently didactic children’s literature captivates its audience with exactly the things that it ostensibly encourages them to disapprove of. The fate of Augustus Gloop in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory may be a caution against the sin of gluttony: but a fat kid getting sucked through a chocolate pipe to an unknown fate is fun to contemplate. It’s the punishment, rather than the moral, which the reader enjoys. Think, too, of the glee in Struwwelpeter and Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (Roald Dahl claimed to have the latter memorised as a child); or the macabre and surreal works of Edward Gorey — not written for children but riffing on the conventions of children’s stories, and an acknowledged influence on Handler.

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That’s the tradition to which Lemony Snicket belongs — and it’s rather older than the amiable duck one, too. Folktales and fairytales are violent and strange, and they are the wellspring from which subsequent children’s literature springs. Handler himself describes being entranced as a child by the tales of the Brothers Grimm; and the turning point in his literary life was when, aged 12, he discovered a copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil in the local library: “I knew what it was at once. The title of the book made it perfectly clear: it was a horror novel.”

Roald Dahl’s stellar success wasn’t, or wasn’t just, a reaction against the wholesomeness of Enid Blyton. Child readers lapped up the surreal grotesquerie and gleeful cruelty of those books. It’s a macabre tradition that goes right back to the start of the modern children’s canon: it’s striking how violent as well as how strange are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and how bloodthirsty is J. M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan. The Princess and the Goblin — often cited as the first children’s fantasy novel — is terrifying at the same time as it’s funny.

In his memoir, Handler writes that he is often told by strangers that he’s “a child at heart”. He doesn’t disagree. He remembers, after all, his mother telling him that if ever their house caught fire he was to jump out of his bedroom window on the grounds that a broken leg would be better than perishing in a fire. The infant Handler’s thoughts filled at once with burned houses, broken legs (“I moved my legs in bed, twisting them best I could into broken positions I had learned from cartoons”), and to the possibility that in falling he’d accidentally eat the poisonous berries from the neighbour’s shrubbery.

“This is what I think of, when people say I am still a child,” he writes: “moving my legs around, thinking about poisoning people and houses burning down.”

Perhaps you’ve already guessed it, readers, but it seems that No More Secrets is not just about lambs, wolves, and sweets. No, it’s also about teachers changing the pronouns and otherwise affirming the gender identities of school children behind parents’ backs. Self-described queer educators are a staple of Libs of TikTok, along with other narcissists filming themselves doing or saying nonsensical things in the name of social justice: transwomen complaining about their non-existent periods, white women castigating other white women for denying they’re racist, drag queens pole dancing for babies, and so on. Raichik offers these snippets up to her 1.9 million followers daily, for general Right-wing mockery and headshaking about moral decline.

Raichik’s enemies loathe her, presenting her as anti-LGBT and far-Right. Whether or not that’s true, based on the evidence available, we at least can say with confidence that she’s no Roald Dahl. Never mind the wise author’s rule of “show, don’t tell” — Raichik can’t even seem to manage “tell, don’t send readers into a coma”. An advertised book extract describes the moment where Rose the lamb breaks down and confides in her parents over a game of Scrabble:

“‘Oh Rose, that’s not good,’ said her father. ‘It’s important you let us know right away if anyone tells you to keep a secret from us.’ So Rose told her parents everything about the candy and Mr. Wooly. Rose’s father put his arm around her and encouraged her, letting her know that she had done the right thing by coming to him. Rose felt very thankful that she was honest and that her parents helped her with this tricky situation.”

Crushing as this style is, Raichik’s book fits squarely within an emerging genre in children’s publishing, whose function is to counter-indoctrinate children from the Right in the most bluntly obvious of ways. Classics of the genre already include Matt Walsh’s Johnny The Walrus, about a small boy who likes dressing up as a walrus, until his mother gets pressured by the “internet people” to take him to the doctor to have his hands and feet surgically turned into flippers. (I think we can all see where Matt is going with this.)

And then there’s The Parrots Go Bananas!, also from Raichik’s publisher, Brave Books — the tale of a band of parrots determined to ruin the reputation of two monkeys, Bongo and Asher. This was written by Sean Spicer, a former White House Press Secretary and Acting Communications Director for Donald Trump, in order to “reveal the danger of spreading lies”. Brave Books has a lot of other titles too: Little Lives Matter, for instance, about the sanctity of early life, and The Island of Free Ice-Cream, about capitalism versus communism. Indeed, for those with some time on their hands, I recommend the Brave Books website as the source of a fun new game — guess the culture war angle, based on book titles alone! Elephants Are Not Birds may be an easy one to begin with (gender again), but how about Paws Off My Cannon? Is this about the perils of excessive masturbation or the importance of the Second Amendment? (Answer: the latter).

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The Right didn’t start this, of course. In 1920, Nikolai Bukharin wrote under Soviet communism that “the salvation of the young mind and the freeing of it from the noxious reactionary beliefs of their parents is one of the highest aims of the proletarian government”.  Back then, the Left-wing preference was for children’s stories about selfless workers versus the evil bourgeoisie. These days it’s all gay penguin dads, mermaids called Julian, and anti-racist babies. But whether from Right or Left, if you strongly disagree with a particular political ideology and yet see it writ large across a hundred texts aimed at children, it can feel imperative to fight back hard. Children are literally the future, after all. To some, it may seem obvious that, where one political side is desperately trying to indoctrinate the young, the other should adopt just as aggressive counter-measures in response. I’m not so sure, though.

For a start, it’s an open question whether any of these books work on kids as intended. Granted, if Facebook is anything to go by, the world is not short of children parroting favoured political attitudes to the delight of their parents — “so proud of this kiddo for coming out to the pro-life/anti-abortion [delete as appropriate] rally with me, and even making her own placard!” etc. — but that hardly establishes anything Freud hasn’t already explained. And we can’t tell for sure to what extent reading one particular book, or a few, actually shapes young minds, given how hard it is generally to associate any single childhood influence with moral development in a particular direction. The combined cultural forces coming at a child are immense and overwhelming, and rarely can be reduced to any single particularly influential factor.

What does seem true is that, in the short term at least, heavy-handed moralising tends to send some contrarian-minded children to the opposite pole out of sheer rebelliousness. Had my junior self been confronted by drippy Rose the lamb and her overbearingly sanctimonious parents, l feel I might well have been tempted to run straight into the arms of the nearest blue-haired, non-binary teaching assistant, begging to be rescued.

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And there’s also the fact that, for each of these books to work as they are supposed to, the young reader should already have been exposed to the ideas of the ideological enemy. In reality, though, very few kids are likely to encounter both side of the aisle — and especially not given the sort of parent who would buy these books in the first place. Without insight into the other side, books such as Raichik’s and Walsh’s won’t make much sense to a young reader at all. Without knowing that Walsh’s story about the boy who dresses up as a walrus implicitly critiques the practice of medically transitioning youths, it reads like an inexplicably gruesome horror story – the mother wants to do what to her son? Surgically carve his hands into flippers? Equally, without prior exposure to the Right, children are not going to know there is any special ethical significance to the idea of gay penguin dads. They will probably just assume they are learning facts about the natural world.

But the biggest problem with any of these political forays into children’s publishing is that they are a performative war between two sets of adults that basically hate each other, with young minds as the battle terrain to be won or lost. Apart from anything else, this makes the books in question very boring. The best and most engaging children’s literature captures something about being a child and reflects it back in a way that they can understand. It can be anarchic, dream-like, funny, or sad, but it must talk first and most directly to the child, and only second to any adults eavesdropping. Books written in order to wage culture wars against other adults are unlikely to do this.

In the way that books such as Raichik’s use children’s literacy for adult ends, they are not so far away from a different form of literature-based performance, also happening this week: World Book Day. Once a year, modern parents are expected to dress their kid up as a favourite book character for school, and many take up the call very enthusiastically. For others, it’s an exercise in humiliation. My own days of fishing madly about in a meagre dressing-up box at 8.45am shouting expletives are over, but I remember the feeling. And there was also the embarrassing fact that my children did not really like reading books at all, and certainly not the sort of books that would send the “right” signals to my peers. The high point of my World Book Day career, if you can call it that, was when my 10-year-old son went in clutching the Top Gear Annual, dressed as his favourite fictional character, Jeremy Clarkson. (At the time, I just felt relieved because we already had the cords and a jumper.)

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With occasions such as World Book Day, just as with the parental purchase of books like Raichik’s or their Left-wing equivalent, there is a strong sense of performance for other tribe members, and of children being used as somewhat bemused pawns in adult games. In a world where smartphones and X-Boxes loom distractingly on the horizon for most adolescents, where reading for pleasure is dying out among adults, and where English degrees are disappearing from universities, it probably feels important for the middle-classes to convince themselves that their children still read books and not just TikTok captions.

It’s hard to predict the future of World Book Day, and other such attempts to tell ourselves that valuable things from the past are still safe in our hands. Perhaps the culture wars will eventually result in Rose the conservative lamb squaring up to Julian the progressive mermaid in playgrounds across the nation. More probably though, the whole performance is already on its way out. Though it will cling on for a while as a form of historical re-enactment — kids in strange costumes gingerly holding up books in assembly, pretending they know what to do with them — eventually it will die, along with the desultory habits of reading that were used to rationalise its existence. And helping the whole process along will be books about non-binary giraffes and communist ice-cream sellers, written by axe-grinding political obsessives, killing off childish excitement at the written word one heavily pointed sentence at a time.

With nine books and several prizes to her name — her debut collection, The Language of Cat, was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal — Rooney’s career has been marked by success. But now it is over, following what she describes as “two and a half years of intensive bullying for doing nothing more than telling the truth”: namely, that there’s something deeply concerning about the prevailing orthodoxy around gender identity.

While JK Rowling might be too famous to cancel, those with heterodox views in the foothills of literary fame have two choices: keep quiet or leave. It’s a lesson not only Rooney has been forced to learn: only last year, Gillian Philip, who used to write animal fantasy novels under the name Erin Hunter, was suddenly dropped by her publishers after voicing her support for Rowling’s views on the importance of women-only spaces. She retrained as a lorry driver, noting that “the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive — and a lot less misogynistic — than the world of children’s writing”.

Rooney’s path to creative writing is a story in itself. Following a “toxic relationship” and nervous breakdown that led to her being hospitalised, poetry became her “main tool for recovery”. At 49, she won a CLiPPA (a national award for children’s poetry) for her first collection. After years of working as a teacher, she describes being “catapulted into a second career as a children’s writer”; her books were endorsed by everyone from Carol Ann Duffy to David Walliams.

But things began to change when Rooney felt compelled to investigate why so many autistic teenagers were identifying as the opposite sex. “I was once a gender non-conforming autistic child,” she tells me. “I know how it is to be uncomfortable in your own skin, to hate what society tells you it is to be female. It felt strange to realise that my growing reservations around the simplistic idea that children can be ‘born in the wrong body’ would be seen as being bigoted and hateful. I had always been progressive, even ‘woke’.”

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Rooney, undeterred by the hostility she knew might follow, started to gently question whether our understanding of gender identity has become warped — only to find herself unfriended and blocked by a number of children’s authors. Many, she explains, did “get in touch privately and admitted to being too scared to speak out — others said they had been warned off from engaging with the topic”.

But Rooney was determined not to be intimidated. So rather than back down, she decided to write a book to “counter the explosion in titles which told children they might be trapped in the wrong body if they don’t conform to stereotypes”. Through 2018 she worked on what was to become My Body is Me! with the illustrator Jessica Ahlberg. Published a year later by Transgender Trend, a well-established group of parents and professionals “who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender”, it challenges sexist stereotypes and promotes a positive self-image.

“It’s a proudly inclusive book,” she says. “We talked in depth about the celebratory message we wanted to get across: we aimed to show a diverse range of personalities, body types and family set-ups.”

Of course, Rooney suspected she would face a backlash — but nothing could prepare her for what happened next. Ahlberg, whose parents Janet and Allan Ahlberg wrote and illustrated a number of best-selling children’s books including The Jolly Postman and Peepo, was for the most part ignored. Rooney, however, continues to be monstered and hounded more than two years later.

She explains that “a core of around a dozen authors, librarians, book bloggers and illustrators” — some of whom have allegedly been encouraged by “committee members in the Society of Authors (SoA)” — have repeatedly “smeared” her online in “an attempt to drum her out of publishing”. She recalls: “Fellow authors discussed my ‘hateful world view’, my ‘transphobia’, my bigoted, exclusionary nature and even my autism.”

Take Clara Vulliamy, creator of the Dotty Detective series and daughter of the acclaimed children’s author Shirley Hughes, described Rooney as representing “an extreme ideology that explicitly targets children”. Vulliamy even went so far as to compare Rooney to Tommy Robinson.

“In her post,” Rooney explains, “Vulliamy tagged an agency that employed me to do school visits, warning them about my views and saying ‘ideologically driven school visits could see us all in deep water’. I don’t think she’d even read My Body is Me and thankfully I had a good reputation at the schools I worked in, so kept that work. Ultimately, all I did was speak out on issues around education, literature, child development, safeguarding and more specifically, the female, autistic perspective. I did so because I care.”

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There is, however, only so much vitriol a person can endure. And soon Rooney started to struggle with bouts of debilitating anxiety. “It was exhausting. The thought of socialising with people in publishing made me feel physically sick. Poetry was not only my livelihood; it was how I stayed sane. But after the abuse from others in my profession I began to associate it with trauma.”

Then, towards the end of last year, Rooney received an urgent call from her agent to inform her that the publisher of her children’s books was unhappy with her outspoken questioning of gender identity. “I was told that my stance could be considered offensive and that people had been complaining. Two independent bookshops had refused to stock my latest picture book, The Problem with Problems, even though it was entirely unrelated to gender ideology.

“I was told I needed to stop tweeting about the risks to children from gender identity ideology and to remove posts on social media. But I was never offensive, I just told the truth as I see it.” When she refused to be silenced, Rooney was told that her Twitter account would not be copied into any online publicity “in case it sent traffic my way where people might learn of my ‘offensive’ views.”

Soon the campaign to vilify Rooney ratcheted up. Save the Children were bullied by activists into taking down from social media a charity video of Gillian Anderson reading The Problem with Problems. Waterstones was targeted after it posted a video of Tom Hardy reading the same book, though didn’t back down.

But the harassment against gender-critical authors hasn’t stopped. Last week, author Jay Hulme, who identifies as transgender, posted a tweet accusing an unnamed author who “hates that I’m trans and write for kids” of preventing the publication of one of his books. Hulme was supported by Vulliamy, who added: “People within children’s publishing, you KNOW who Jay is talking about.” Rooney wasn’t named, but is confident she was the subject of these posts.

I contacted several of those making accusations against the “unnamed author”. The only person who responded was Hulme, who told me: “I didn’t name the author for a reason — because I don’t believe in pile ons or digital attacks, and so I cannot and will not confirm any names or comment further. Had I wished to expand, I would have done already.”

The SoA also appeared to close ranks. Rather than responding to my enquiry, a press officer directed me to a link to a statement from August which outlined the SoA’s stance on inclusivity. Remarkably, their policy states that SoA will ensure “individuals are supported and able to speak out”.

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No doubt Rooney would beg to differ. The repeated smears, sly insinuations and cowardice of the professional bodies have all taken their toll, not least on how her work is received. “People often talk of cancel culture. But there is a more insidious technique at play — one that’s harder to prove but palpable to the receiver; that of ‘Ghosting Culture’. It’s when your book is left off reading lists; when it doesn’t get reviewed; when you are not invited on a panel to discuss it. It’s where organisations you’ve worked with and even long-time friends suddenly avoid sharing publicity about it.”

And yet despite everything — the abuse, the betrayal, the attempts to silence her — Rooney says she has no regrets. She has one more book due in 2022, The Fears you Fear, but it will be her last.

“I can’t work in an industry that purports to care for children yet polices and punishes those who raise safeguarding concerns,” she says. “Regardless of what anyone believes, we should always be free to talk about what’s in the best interests of children.”

However, given her venomous treatment, and that of her fellow authors, it seems unlikely she will be the last victim of the publishing purges. Her story, of overcoming barriers and reaching success in middle-age, is surely impressive; it ought to serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers. But thanks to the stunted vision of those who hold sway in children’s writing, the moral of Rooney’s tale is entirely different: “publish and be damned”.

One of the most brilliant of many brilliant things about J. K. Rowling’s books was the way in which they grew up alongside their readers. In the first novel, Harry turned 11, and he grew older with each one; an 11-year-old reader of that first book would have crested young adulthood at the same time Harry did. The stories grew darker, more complex, more challenging. The adventures spilled out from the classroom into the wider adult world. The dangers were greater, the reverses and losses more permanent and more grave.

But then, of course, they stopped and their readers carried on into the trackless wastes of maturity without him. That will have been a loss.

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It’s worth taking this opportunity to say what artful books they are, and how thoroughly imagined was their world: Rowling seeded future developments and plot strands so early in the first book; she dropped her trail of breadcrumbs. She knew where she was going, and she went there at just the right pace, and (admirably) she stopped when she got there, her story told. The writing may not have been showy, but it did its work. She picked out evocative details — Ollivander’s moonlike eyes, say, or the light through the high windows striping the stone corridors of Hogwarts. She employed the whole sensorium to make her world immediate. And there was a warm gleam of humour on every page.

When they first came out, some early reviewers — including this one — groused a little that Rowling was a magpie. The novels seemed to be a collage of influences: this from T. H. White or Tolkien, that from Roald Dahl, this from The Worst Witch; that from any number of old-fashioned boarding-school stories; this – blimey — from Kafka. But of course, looking back, to indict her for a lack of originality was to miss the point. Rowling knew just what she was doing. She was in the business of building a myth. And all myths steal and repurpose previous stories: they draw their power from them. The Torah was a straight remix of Babylonian creation myths and all the better for it.

And if a myth does its job, it offers — however fantastical — a way of thinking about the world. Like many children’s books, the Harry Potter books set out to affirm a set of moral principles for the generation that grew up with them; and given the almost 100% saturation of the market it’s fair to assume they will have had an influence. These principles are, we can say, pretty uncontroversial. They affirm the value of courage, honesty, loyalty and the importance of friendship. They say that bullying is to be deplored, kindness valued; that might doesn’t make right and that love is stronger than hate.

They go in to bat, too, for some easy liberal values. Slavery is a bad thing. Eugenics and racial profiling are no-nos. Torture and random sadistic murder are definitely frowned on. Hey kids, these books say full-throatedly: don’t be a Nazi, ‘mkay?

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In so doing, and in the very reasonable line of being children’s books, and bloody good ones — and exciting stories at that — they present the world as an all-or-nothing heroic struggle between unmitigated good and unfathomable evil. You have lovely, wise, kind and selfless Dumbledore in one corner and you have that utter rotten egg Voldemort in the other. Pick a team.

Institutions are to be trusted only inasmuch as they are run by goodies (the Ministry of Magic is eminently corruptible but Dumbledore’s Hogwarts is not, at least while the old man remains in charge), and rules are to be broken ad lib as long as it’s the goodies doing it. Normative authority is creepy old Filch, skulking the corridors with Mrs Norris in search of fun to spoil and miscreants to snitch on. The mainstream media is the prurient and unctuous scratching of Rita Skeeter. Suburban normies — incarnated in the Dursleys of Privet Drive — are the pits.

In their fine texture, the books are subtler than that — Snape’s story arc, for instance, has a level of real moral complexity; and the psychology of the protagonists’ day-to-day friendships is not simplistic — but the basic shape of the main story is goodies vs baddies to the death. And that is, as I say, quite proper. They’re children’s books.

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Revolutions eat their children. Critics of the series have since argued that there are subtextual or framing issues: that they’re kind of heteronormative (Dumbledore was, Rowling told us later, gay — but there’s scant evidence for it in the text); or that they’re kind of white (Rowling welcomed the casting of a black Hermione in the stage show, and Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote interestingly about how a black Hermione would have enriched the story in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, but, again, the text tends not to support the idea).

You may agree with these criticisms or you may scoff at them — but it’s striking that an audience primed to take a binary goodies vs baddies worldview has turned with some decisiveness on the author of that worldview when it decided (most dramatically over her gender-critical comments on Twitter) that she’s on the other team.

Our cultural and political moment now looks very much like one with a sorting-hat view of the world: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you an identity. If you’re Slytherin, that’s that.

That is to say: evil is held to reside ineradicably in the person so sorted. The extent to which this has become general is shown on the reaction to the now notorious Harper’s letter — signed, among many others, by J. K. Rowling — which offered some pretty unexceptionable bromides on free speech. The debate centred not on the arguments made in the letter but on the people who signed their names to it. The question not was it the right argument, but were they the right people? Was the Dark Mark upon them? One signatory who had freely endorsed the contents of the letter, presumably having at least skim-read them, immediately withdrew their support and apologised on the express grounds that they never would have signed had they known who else was signing. Wrong team. Expelliarmus.

These are, as I’ve said before, children’s books. Harry Potter, somewhere in the multiverse, grew up. So must his audience.

Chickens are not particularly intelligent or expressive creatures. But Sunny and Flowery, as our three-year-old daughter named them, were surprisingly characterful nonetheless. Sunny: bold and friendly. Flowery: daft and a worrier, with one crooked toe, making loud distress calls the moment Sunny was out of eyeshot. Our daughter loved them, quickly learning to handle them gently and help look after them. For an only child, deprived of playmates by lockdown, they were desperately-needed friends.

They soon outgrew their brooder box, and we built them a large wire coop outside, taking care to secure it against foxes. We got used to the sound of cheeping on the back patio. Our daughter would play in the coop for an hour at a time, chatting to the chicks and laughing merrily as they gave themselves dust baths.

Then disaster struck. We went out for ‘chick check’ after tea to find a section of the wire pulled away from the frame, and no chicks. It turns out a hungry fox is stronger than you might think, and despite what we thought were thorough fox-proofing measures, we had failed to protect them. All that was left of Sunny and Flowery was a few grey feathers.

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It felt like the heart was gone from our garden. The household mourned, and no one more than our daughter. She’d poured heart and soul into being ‘chicken mummy’, and losing them both so abruptly was devastating.

It also prompted an agonised debate between her parents. When she saw the hole in the fence our daughter said: “Maybe Sunny and Flowery escaped and went to visit their cousins?” We wondered: should we let her carry on believing this comforting, anthropomorphised lie? Or tell her the truth, that a predator broke into the chicken run and ate her pets?

Mulling this over, it struck me that our prevailing culture is methodical about hiding the real-world relation between predators and prey from small children. From birth onwards, products and media aimed at babies and children are covered in cute, anthropomorphised animals – all wholly divorced from any reference to their nature.

By this I don’t mean nursery books should contain scientific lectures about animal behaviour. But when I think of older folk tales with animal protagonists, their actions are generally rooted in some sense of what each type of animal might plausibly do.

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In Aesop’s famous fable of the lion and the mouse, we know animals don’t really talk but both creatures are at least a bit lion-y and mouse-y in their behaviour. In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer puts chivalric and literary allusions in the mouths (OK, beaks) of farmyard chickens, a comic absurdity. But anyone who’s ever met a rooster will recognise Chauntecleer’s mix of amour propre and foolishness, just as I (sadly) now recognise the wily determination of the hungry fox. Even the 1972 classic Watership Down is grounded in observation of rabbit behaviour. But this basic reference to animals’ nature is almost entirely missing from modern depictions of animals.

Contemporary retellings of the folk tale Henny Penny don’t end with the fox eating the birds. I’ve lost count of the preschool picture books I’ve read that depict species which in reality have a predator/prey relationship as friends. Whenever I see this part of me wants to stop reading and tell my daughter: “Of course, in real life this fox would chase this bunny and try to eat it.” Modern sensibilities retort: what kind of sociopath would say that to her pre-schooler at bedtime?

Similar examples on TV are legion, but the CBeebies animation ‘Hey Duggee’ serves to illustrate. The characters are all depicted as animals, but a crocodile is the same size as a mouse or a rhinoceros, and none of the characters’ personalities corresponds in any recognisable way to the animal they’re meant to be.

This matters, because children absorb stories as vital sources of knowledge about the world. And TV programmes in which a crocodile is waved off by his elephant mummy to attend playgroup with a mouse and an octopus do nothing to convey the truth that different animals have different natures. Or the fact that some animals, including humans, eat other animals. Instead, to spare our own squeamishness, we end up teaching our children a kind of wilful ignorance about animals’ relationship to one another, and about our own relationship to the natural world.

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A compassionate carnivore's manifesto

By John Lewis-Stempel

The livestock farmer John Lewis-Stempel wrote last week for UnHerd about humanely killing a terminally injured ewe, not realising the rest of the flock was watching. In the flock’s reaction to witnessing this, he experiences “a kaleidoscopic moment” of recognising that the flock was not just sentient but “composed of sub-groups based on friendship and family bonds.” The experience, he says, ended his “objectification of sheep”.

But, Lewis-Stempel says, while animals must not be objectified, it doesn’t follow that we should stop farming them. Rather, we should keep livestock in conditions that suit their nature, and accept humans’ role as both caretakers and respectful predators by slaughtering humanely toward the end of an animal’s natural life and eating ‘nose to tail’.

But this means accepting both that animals have natures, and also that humans are predators — facts we seem desperate to avoid imparting to our children. Instead, we condemn forms of animal cruelty asymmetrically, depending on what the cruelty implies about our relation to the suffering animals.

Compare public opposition to fox-hunting with the relative public indifference to factory farming. Both of these practices cause animals to suffer. But fox-hunting depends on a willingness to accept that humans are predators — and also that being a predator can be fun.

This is something we avert our gaze from in domestic cats, even as a sea of internet memes puts cutesy words in feline mouths. As for confronting the same blood-lust in humans, forget it. Never mind that a fox in a henhouse will carry on killing well beyond what it needs for food, the idea that it might be fun to chase a fox through the countryside on horseback implies something that horrifies modern sensibilities: that in fact, like the fox (or the cat currently purring on my knee), humans can enjoy hunting for pleasure as well as food.

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In contrast, the industrial-scale cruelty of factory livestock farming is utilitarian, and founded in a willingness to treat livestock as things — a wholly different order of entity to us. We have no particular duty to take species-specific needs or behaviour into account, beyond the minimum needed for productivity.

And for the most part we shrug our shoulders at the fear, pain and misery this industry causes. According to Compassion in World Farming, 70% of livestock in the UK are kept indoors, in factory farming conditions — and this is with Britain’s vaunted high standards of farm animal welfare. In the less-regulated United States, it’s worse: if you’ve a strong stomach, this gives a sense of the situation for American livestock.

Paul Krause writes about the way utilitarian exploitation of the natural world has its roots in Francis Bacon’s vision of humanity as separate from and in opposition to nature:

As Bacon made clear, man would have to strip and unclothe the natural world, pin nature down and violate her, in order to learn nature’s innermost secrets, which would then inaugurate the “reign [and] empire of man.”

Krause argues that this antagonistic vision is central to our looming ecological crisis — an extractive relationship that sees humans as not on a continuum with plants and animals but as separate from and entitled to exploit and dominate them. This view seems both widespread and intractable. Campaigners can point out till they’re blue in the face how the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that this is not sustainable, but to date this doesn’t seem to be having any impact on economic policy.

And many of the ‘save the earth’ campaigners are no better. They’ve just substituted a ‘saviour’ role for the ‘dominator’ one, while leaving unchallenged the belief in humans’ separateness and superiority, as well as the indifference to animals’ actual nature. Think of those activists who released thousands of mink from a Minnesota fur farm, whereupon they laid waste to local wildlife or simply starved.

On the surface, idealising animals to the point of ignoring their nature looks more empathetic than treating animals merely as ‘flesh robots’, in Lewis-Stempel’s phrase. But it’s still a way of refusing to see them as they are. It’s the cuddly version of the worldview that produces factory farming and ecological destruction on a planetary scale. We may wring our hands about human abuse of the natural world, but by raising our children to objectify animals — even sentimentally — we’re more or less guaranteeing that it continues.

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So we decided to tell our daughter the truth: some animals eat other animals, foxes also have babies to feed, and that’s probably what happened to Sunny and Flowery. It’s a tough lesson for a pre-schooler, in a culture that feeds children battery-farmed chicken dippers while censoring any realistic depiction of carnivores in stories.

The experience has changed her. We were incubating a second clutch of eggs when the raid happened, and since they hatched — all six this time — I’ve noticed our daughter doesn’t treat them like she did Sunny and Flowery. While she’s still keen to help care for them, she’s less emotionally invested. Perhaps she’s still mourning her lost chicks. (I am, if I’m honest.) The new crowd seems less individual: six chicks is a little flock, which makes them harder to tell apart. In turn that makes it more difficult to project emotions onto them.

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. If we’re to get out of this ecological mess, we need our kids to grow up understanding that animals are not just foils for our inner lives, or fuel for our economies. Rather, they have their own natures, and they are different to us. But not that different.

What can we infer, then, from the general state of illustrated children’s books? One thing is clear: we do not value beauty.

Many illustrations aimed at children seem calculated to insult their readership. Flat, clashing colours combine with distorted outlines of humans and animals that convey contempt for their subjects. It is as though we react to a young child’s natural wonder at the world by seeking to present him or her not with wonderful things but instead with foot-shuffling embarrassment and a desire to make off-colour jokes.

Nothing about Tyrannosaurus Drip makes sense

Take, for example, the story and illustrations in Tyrannosaurus Drip. In narrative terms, nothing about this book makes sense within the frame of reference you would expect a normal three- to six-year-old to have. Meanwhile the illustrations are ugly and unpleasant. The whole work has a strangely arch tone, as if talking over a child’s head at a knowing, cynical adult.

In the Maisy Mouse series, flowers are to be counted, not wondered at

Elsewhere, the Maisy Mouse books combine clashing colours with a strange lack of gentleness or movement in the pictures themselves. The stories at least provide narratives familiar to small children, about experiences most children will have in the modern world. But the series overall leaves me with the sense of a humdrum world, unleavened by dreams, mystery or surprise, where flowers are less a source of wonder than a set of objects to be counted.

Behold the horrible, scrawling illustrations of Unicorn Expert

For an even uglier and less veiled instance of the children’s literature genre devoted to stripping the world of magic, try Sophie Johnson, Unicorn Expert. In this unutterably sad story, a little girl is so consumed by self-absorption and a determination to force everyone and everything around her to be a ‘unicorn’ that she fails to notice when a real unicorn appears in her life.

This never changes, and at the end of the book Sophie is congratulating herself on her expertise in caring for unicorns even as the real unicorn packs its little rainbow suitcase and leaves again. There is no redemption. In the world of Sophie Johnson, enchantment is real but even children are so intent on compelling the world to conform to their ideas that they look straight past it. Eventually enchantment gives up and leaves.

This story, complete with scrawling illustrations reminiscent of a magazine cartoonist, is presented not as tragedy for adults but as an amusing story for chidren. Imagine teaching your innocent, imaginative, open-minded under-five that it is funny to let wonder and mystery vanish from the world.

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This matters to you, the adult. Children enjoy (oh so very many!) repeated readings of their favourite books. So a book with eyeball-searingly ugly illustrations, an incoherent story or bad prose that would be mildly irritating on the first reading will drive you to fury by the hundredth.

In some three years of regular library visits, I have learned that attractive illustrations are a crude but effective indicator of an overall higher-quality bedtime story. If you are fussy about good writing, scanning the library for books with attractive illustrations is a useful way of saving yourself from spending the next fortnight purple with Pooterish rage every bedtime.

But beauty in children’s books has a more profound role than simply keeping parents sane. It is central to the moral values we inculcate in our children, at the very beginning of their education. Since Pythagoras, it has been understood that beauty, whether visual or narrative, is intertwined with the good. Sir Philip Sidney wrote in 1595 that poetry (by which, in the modern sense, he means fiction) has a moral purpose: to ‘delight and teach’. That is, it aims both to give pleasure and also to convey narratives that help to shape the moral universe.

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Sidney was right. Humans are wired by evolution for storytelling, and we make sense of the world not primarily via facts, but narrative. For a pre-literate child, a book’s narrative and its illustrations are part of a single whole. Thus the pictures we show, in the books we present to our children, are as much part of our children’s education — both factual and moral — as the stories.

And beauty matters. In every culture across the world, throughout human history, we have decorated our belongings and environments and found pleasure in beauty. Though beauty may come in different forms, it is something for which humans feel a profound longing. Scientists have recently argued that this longing extends beyond humans into animal species such as birds and even into larger ecological systems. Telling children cynical or incoherent stories, and accompanying those stories with ugly pictures, amounts to training them to disregard their instinctive longing for beauty, and to sneer at or objectify the world instead.

You do not have to read Sidney, Pythagoras or Aristotle to feel instinctively that showing children beautiful pictures is better than showing them ugly ones. To any parent of a preschooler who cares about this, there are plenty of heartening classics, both vintage and modern.

Peepo! is the kind of beautiful classic kids should be read

Sybille von Olfers’ 1906 Root Children offers minutely observed drawings of the natural world, not to mention an exquisite age-appropriate introduction to the Art Deco style. The intricate worlds drawn by Janet and Allen Ahlberg repay close study even by an adult, whether in the playful Each Peach Pear Plum or the beautiful and nostalgic Peepo!

Anna Currey is a contemporary children’s author who gets it right

More recently, anything illustrated by Anna Currey’s delicate pen-and-ink and watercolour work (we have and love One Ted Falls Out Of Bed and Rosie’s Hat) will survive repeated readings without losing their warmth and sense of detail.

Why can’t all children’s books look like The Storm Whale?

Another favourite contemporary writer and illustrator in our house is the wonderful Benji Davies, whose modern classic The Storm Whale is both emotionally subtle and beautifully imagined, with something new to discover on every read.

The work of Benji Davies is also genuinely beautiful

Nor do nonfiction titles need to be free from wonder or beauty. Ella Bailey’s One Day On Our Blue Planet series adopts a clean-lined graphic style that is contemporary, spare and still full of life. She guides readers through different habitats — the Antarctic, the South American jungle and the African savannah — giving a glimpse of the wildlife there with just enough narrative to delight parents as well as children. (After two months of requesting the South American one at bedtime every night, my three-year-old can now name some ten species of rainforest monkey.)

It should be clear by now that I do not understand beauty to mean a single style or some dreary notion of realism. Beauty comes in many forms. With regard to children’s books, it is less about the style than a sense that the artist has taken care to represent their subject faithfully and with affection.

This is profoundly important. The default setting of small children is imaginatively ‘being’ something other than themselves: a cat, a fairy, the latest Disney princess. It is a process of exploring and gaining understanding both of self and of environment and is critical to normal social and emotional development. Stories and pictures whose illustrations encourage imaginative empathy and respect for their subject matter will encourage this developmental stage.

Caricatures, on the other hand, by distorting their subject matter in a way that diminishes its dignity, beauty or appeal, have the opposite effect. One cannot easily be ironic and imaginative at the same time, except perhaps in the form of satire.

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My daughter often adopts a persona from a story or TV show she has seen, and can ‘be’ that persona for days at a time. But I have never seen her ‘be’ a character who was presented as caricature. Why would anyone wish to inhabit imaginatively a persona who was presented with a sneer?

A young child whose ordinary imaginative play was satirical in character would come across as disturbed to say the least. And how is a child accustomed to caricatures of the world supposed to develop into an adult filled with empathy for others and a love of beautiful surroundings?

Is this ugliness really what we want for the next generation?

Ugly stories with ugly pictures communicate materiality without wonder, conflict without resolution, sneering without kindness, and nonsense without clarification. Such stories train a child to accept those values in his or her adult life, without hope for anything better. Is that really what we want for the next generation?