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[timelets]

So I approach a blank page with the understanding that children need food, and adventure (and with adventure, the promise that an adversary can and will be overcome), and a microscope to investigate the detail of daily life. But children also have a craving for jokes. A joke is a form of cherishing as well as a form of novelty.

Yet the thing I longed for most in children’s books were stories that would salute the reader’s intelligence, acknowledging that though small and hectic and clumsy without, we were not small and hectic and clumsy within.

At the end of my list of things I longed for is the most divisive among both child and adult readers: magic. I longed for the impossible.

For more than three thousand years we have been inventing mythical creatures, but the reason we have done so is less clear.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/katherine-rundell/why-children-s-books