My fairy goddaughter has an uncommon name. I decided I'd try to find a book with a protagonist who shares her name and, after much searching, was able to find one. Unfortunately, it wasn't currently in print in Canada and the library didn't have it, so I had to order it from the UK. Because of this, I didn't know how the protagonist was portrayed or what the moral of the story was.
(I prefer to curate the books I give to children as gifts. While I don't object to people - including children - reading junk or fluff (as I'm sure you've noticed from this year's experiment of posting the books I read), I like to give them things that are quality.)
Fortunately, my fairy goddaughter can't read yet, so her parents could screen the book for appropriate message and characterization. If it's not appropriate, they can just not read it to her.
But by this time next year, she'll probably be able to read. So if I decide to send her a book that I can't preview first for whatever reason, she will be able to read it right away without the story being screened for appropriateness first (or, at least, end up in the awkward situation of her parents wanting to take away a book she's enthusiastic about reading.)
And, just a couple of years later, she'll be reading chapter books. It's one thing to plop down in Mabel's Fables and read a pile of picture books that are a dozen pages each with only a couple of sentences on each page, to make sure that the characterization and moral of each book is something I want to put in front of a child I love. But it would be quite another thing to have to read several hundred pages (even in the large, easy font of children's chapter books) in order to make an informed choice. Especially since the pool of children I buy books for is rapidly expanding (Baby Cousin 3.0 just made his debut a few days ago!) and I try not to duplicate purchases among children who are acquainted with each other and might plausibly visit each other's homes and paw through each other's bookshelves.
My proposed solution: a single comprehensive website (MoralOfTheStory.com) that describes the ending and moral of children's books. (Example: "Ending: he tries green eggs and ham and likes it. Moral of the story: try new foods, you might like them.") It could also give a brief description of the characterization of the named characters (or, if that's too much, just the title character), so before you buy Amelia Bedelia for a little girl named Amelia, you know that Amelia Bedelia is a bit of a ditz but an excellent baker.
There are websites to tell you whether various children's media is too scary or too "adult" - the exact reasons why they're rated PG, for example. But, at least for books that are so young they're definitely rated G, I haven't been able to find any single reliable source of the moral of the story or the characterization of the protagonist.
It would be especially useful to integrate this into Amazon, since children's books bought sight unseen would most likely be bought on the internet.
2 comments:
It never occured to me that Green Eggs and Ham has a moral!
So reviews at Amazon or GoodReads don't do this, or don't do it well enough?
Not when I need them to. I didn't find the books I was thinking of when I wrote this post. Just now I searched for some other children's books with which I'm familiar in an attempt to find an example, and I found some Amazon and GoodReads reviews that do answer these questions. But these are all books that I was able to look at in person, either when buying them or at the library.
So maybe the ones that I can't find answers for don't have reviews because they're less popular?
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