![]() Besides, one wants to give the author, with her talent for Freudian matters, the benefit of a doubt, and to suppose that the book offers little kids the sick cathartic pleasure of Alexander’s meaningless suffering. ![]() I am not sure that Alexander, despite its awards, regardless of its Hollywoodization, has enough cultural weight to sink to a record-low depth. (It is written in prose and without attractive prosody: There’s no rhythm and rhyme to serve as auto-pilot technology guiding an adult through brainless declamations where the words take an express route the optic nerve to the vocal apparatus.) And meanwhile you simpletons with your treacle-coated claptrap reflexively cheering any interaction between a human child and a printed word are not at all to be trusted, and probably worse than illiterates. We parents, after all, are deafened by the cries of tykes who want want want to be read for the 600th time The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which gets my vote as the worst Dr. ![]() ![]() We adults, after all, are blinded by sentiment against the narrative demerits and moral dementia of so very many of the classics we were indoctrinated with back. Is Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day the very worst book for young readers? I’ll grant that it’s a tricky question-but only because the question of bad kids’ books is difficult to discuss rationally. ![]()
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