|
|
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I Have To Agree..., December 12, 1999
By A Customer
...with the negative reviews of these books. For one thing, the illustrations, while many and large, really aren't that great, and don't remotely hold a candle to Pauline Baynes' original illos *or* the Dillons' covers for the late releases of the books. (I'm a professional graphic artist who started out doing children's illustration, and I have a 6 year old daughter and 7 year old son, and I still hold an interest and look at quite a bit of it.) I was a little angry the first time I saw these in a bookstore, but mostly, I was just sad. Like others, here, and many of my generation, I had "the Narnia books" read to me, all of them in a row, before I could read, when I was four-five and my sister two-three. Neither of us was bored by them, nor were we confused, and nearly thirty years later, we're still in love with the books and have read them umpteen times. In addition, I have to agree with the customer from Georgia, about the obvious editorial bias shown in these "adaptations." I'm not a Christian myself, but why on earth would you want to read Narnia with all of Lewis' deep, sincere (and however you feel about the particulars, pretty reasonable) faith leeched from it, the very thing that gives it its lasting power? Aslan-as-Christ, the heart of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is so glossed over in the picture books that it isn't surprising "Georgia" just plain missed it. In that sense, and in a small way, these books remind of of that attempt at sanitizing Huckleberry Finn in the mid-eighties. (As if one of the most powerful and lasting anti-racist works of a shamfully racist period *needed* sanitizing...) I have kids of my own, now, and I've observed other parents, and...the "dumbing down," over the course of my lifetime, of children's fiction doesn't have anything to do with kids or what they want or what they can handle. It's all about parents who feel like their lives are somehow more busy, pressured and consumed than those of any other parents in history. This is nonsense--if anything, my contemporaries, and late-parenting Baby Boomers I know, have *more* time, more money, less pressure all around than my blue-collar family had. Parents I know have endless time and energy to spend on their own pursuits, including, most bizarre to me, among my "Gen-X" peers, obsessing over and collecting the works of obscure musicians, the detritus of our childhoods (Brady Bunch/Disney/whatever memorobilia, old video games, etc.), and most astoningly, buying and playing expensive video games, which are almost entirely directed at adults, now, not children. When it comes to reading with their kids, though, there seems to be a great demand for Cliff's Notes versions of *everything.* God forbid that you should spend more than fifteen minutes reading your kid a book or anything. These books weren't created for kids. They were created for lazy parents. They, and other books like them, are a stain on this wildly-educated, economically properous, but wildly unfocused time, and any parent who passes up "the real deal" in favor of these Happy Meal versions of C.S. Lewis should be ashamed of himself or herself. These are worse, much worse, than those awful Scholastic series of garbage novels, and I hate those an awful lot. (Anybody else remember when Scholastic's goal was to get *real books* into kids hands, cheap, not sell them market-priced editions of the juvenile equivalent of Dean R. Koontz and Danielle Steele?) END
|
by C. S. Lewis
by Deborah Maze
by C. S. Lewis
by C.S. Lewis
by C. S. Lewis
