Our country doesn’t value literature the way it once did, and nowhere is that more apparent than the sad state of children’s books.
This includes Healthy Holly. Baltimore is having a rough go of it this week, as its Mayor Catherine Pugh resigned Thursday amid a corruption scandal involving her books for children.
While she was a board member of the University of Maryland Medical System, she arranged for the system to purchase 100,000 copies of her Healthy Holly books. Pugh’s Health Holly LLC ended up with $500,000, and kids ended up with a badly punctuated, preachy mess.
Gone are the days of The Runaway Bunny (1942), The Little Prince (1943), and Where the Wild Things Are (1963). The Runaway Bunny is a fable about a mother’s love, The Little Prince is deeply philosophical and perhaps more delightful to read as an adult, and Where the Wild Things Are is not only beautifully illustrated, but also enlightening without moralizing.
Instead, we now have A is for Activist (2012), She Persisted by Chelsea Clinton (2017), and Superheroes Are Everywhere by Kamala Harris (2019). The books deal explicitly with political and social justice issues; rather than weaving their themes through a memorable story, they catalogue social ills so your children can grow up with a healthy dose of righteous rage. If that’s not enough, there’s also Woke Baby (2018), which, unfortunately, is not satire.
Pugh’s Healthy Holly books wouldn’t have made it to so many children’s hands without her scheming, but I’m willing to bet her plot was made easier by the sad state of modern children’s literature. Why give kids a subtle classic such as Goodnight Moon when you can teach them a lesson instead?
Books like Healthy Holly and Woke Baby miss the point of literature, which is to inspire us with a beautiful story. But it’s much easier to pass on all that literary stuff and write a book whose title makes parents feel good for reading it to their kids, even if they probably won’t remember any of the content.
If you want your kids to grow up reading and to understand why books still matter in a digital age, give them Where the Wild Things Are. If you want them to learn the value of eating healthy and exercising, just send them outside.
