| From
the January/February 2004 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Madonna, Fair and Unbalanced
 hen
Fox News invited me last summer to go on TV and talk about “why
children shouldn’t read the new Harry Potter,” I declined,
not so much because I was afraid of indignant hordes of ten-year-olds
and their parents descending upon the Horn Book offices on their
Nimbi 2000, but because I thought children should read
the new Harry Potter. Just so long as I didn’t have
to. If Fox was looking for a fight — and they were —
they would have to find a different fall guy.
But not having shot any fish in a barrel since,
oh, Rosemary Wells colorized Garth Williams, I said yes when Fox
called again and asked me to talk with Bill O’Reilly about
Madonna’s new book. Given O’Reilly’s reputation
for adversarial interviewing, I was a little worried that he figured
I was a fan of The English Roses, but then I became more
worried that in fact he was, and went on to creep myself
out by imagining Big Bill rocking to the rhythm of “Papa Don’t
Preach.”
Not to worry. The difference of opinion O’Reilly
and I had regarding Madonna was this: he thinks she shouldn’t
write books for children because she’s a tramp; I think she
shouldn’t write books for children because she can’t
write. Outraged by Madonna’s soul kiss with Britney Spears
on the MTV Awards, Bill thought she was a terrible role model for
children. While also lamenting her taste in women, I thought Madonna
needed to do what every aspiring writer for children should. While
on her regular visits to her local public library with Lourdes and
Rocco, Madonna should have been buddying up with the children’s
librarian to find out just what good writing for children is. She
needed to do what Jane Yolen does: describing how she spends a typical
day, Yolen once wrote, “I read, read, read all of the time.”
Bill O’Reilly might have followed Yolen’s
lead as well; in our amicable chat before taping, O’Reilly
said that though he hadn’t read The English Roses,
he had “looked at it.” While I understand that this
is par for the course among media pundits, we’re not talking
about The English Patient here: Harvard grad O’Reilly
should have been able to get through Madonna’s book in ten
minutes, tops, and those minutes might have saved him from later
looking kind of goofy for insisting that the book had been ghostwritten.
If only.
He also would have discovered, I’m afraid,
that he liked it. The English Roses, a story of four little
girls who ostracize a fifth, is as hectoringly moralistic as any
episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” though not any
more so than most picture books by celebrity authors. A survey of
these books reveals one moral hammered at over and over: listen
to Mother. I suspect that the reason these books sell so well has
as much to do with this message as it does with the star power of
their authors. (The How-Much-I-Love-You books equally popular with
parents sell for the same reason — they make grownups feel
indispensable and in charge.)
Why do otherwise sensible adults excuse —
or worse, not notice — bad storytelling in a book for children
as long as “it has a good message”? Because they think
this is what children’s books are all about. So please, Madonna,
when you make that trip to the library, pick up a copy of The
Hundred Dresses to see what a real writer does with your chosen
theme. Take along any of your friends, celebrated or otherwise,
who have children. Then, all of you, read, read, read, as much as
you can.
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