This essay collection, whose subtitle is “On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children’s Books,” is from the 1960s, and while there are aspects of the content and style that feel a bit dated, I still found it to be an interesting and satisfying read now, and came away from it with a whole list of new-to-me kids’ books that I now want to read. I like Cameron’s evocations of her own childhood, as when she talks in the foreword about going to the library with her mother on Saturday mornings (library trips with my mom were a big part of my childhood too!) or when she talks in the book’s final essay about her friendship with her landlady’s father when he was in his eighties and she was a child. That final essay is one of my favorites, actually, though it’s largely about Eleanor Farjeon, whose work I’ve never read: I like the way that Cameron brings together a biographical sketch of Farjeon and really pleasing quotes from Farjeon’s writing about her childhood and Cameron’s own childhood memories.
My absolute favorite piece, though, is the title essay, which is about “time fantasy”, from books I’ve read and loved (like L.M. Boston’s Green Knowe books) to books I should have read by now (E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet) to books I’d never heard of before. I love bits of writing like this, where Cameron is talking about how she feels like maybe British time fantasy is the best time fantasy because of the sense of history one has across “the whole of the British Isles, as if layers of Time, or innumerable dimensions of Time cutting across one another, were crowded thick with all the centuries that have passed and none of them really lost” (74). Elsewhere, I like how Cameron describes the experience of being a child as including “delight in the simplest, most secret, sometimes the oddest things” and also “sadnesses and fears and terrors one could not or would not explain” and also “a continuing wonder about much that seems drab and familiar to adults” (14). And it’s interesting when Cameron (who wrote children’s books herself) talks about her own experiences as a writer, particularly in the essay “A Country of the Mind,” where she talks about a sense of place as having been central to the successful creation of one of her novels, which she rewrote after being unhappy with how it ended and realizing a lot of her unhappiness was related to the book’s setting. From that essay, I love this, when Cameron is talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books: “Place moves and breathes within the story; it is not simply background, not a backdrop, never static” (171).
I imagine this book would be extra-interesting to people who write for kids or teach kids or have kids, but even as someone who falls into exactly zero of those categories, I found this book thought-provoking and engaging.
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