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[rivka]

Last night I picked up a new chapter book to read to Alex. "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy."

We read four chapters before bed, stopping - with difficulty - at the end of Edmund's first trip to Narnia and his meeting with the White Witch.

This morning, after breakfast, Alex picked up the book and asked me to read the next chapter. At various points I tried to suggest that we stop. When we finished chapter twelve, just before "Deep Magic From the Dawn of Time," I let her know that if we read any further we wouldn't be able to stop until the end of the book. She wanted to keep going. With some difficulty, I extracted myself long enough to shower. Then we plunged back into it.

We finished the book a few minutes ago. Solidly, since breakfast time, we worked through 140 pages of dense, exciting, scary fantasy. When Aslan died - I debated putting a spoiler warning here, but come on - she sobbed and writhed on the couch in misery. I promised that it would have a happy ending and read inexorably on. Michael came in and held her while I read.

We spent some time afterward reviewing the plot. She kept coming back to the same couple of questions - why did the Witch want to kill Edmund? Why did she kill Aslan? I think it was less that she didn't understand the book and more that she was grappling with the Problem of Evil.

"That was such a saaaaad book!" she complained. "Can we read the second one?"

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

My thoughts about waiting for Harry Potter are based on a few different things. I think they're more graphic and horror-influenced, probably in large part just because our culture is so much more horror-influenced and open to graphic depictions of violence than it was sixty years ago. I am also reluctant to expose her to murdered parents and the attempted murder of an infant. (I know we read James and the Giant Peach, but the level of intensity there was dramatically lower, it's just a brief mention at the very beginning.) Also, Harry Potter just strikes me as being more focused on concerns of older kids, like inter-kid dynamics and lingering resentments and so forth.

The way the series ramps up in complexity and darkness and ambiguity and scariness as you go through the books is also a factor. I think they're meant to be read at about the rate of a book a year, as Harry matures, but who could actually hold their kid to that?

I suspect that LWW may be less frightening to a child who is being raised outside of Christianity and who has never encountered the concept of sin. But yeah, it was intense for her. She really did need to be on her Papa's lap there towards the end. (I was of course nursing the baby while I read, or she would've been on mine.)