The other day my family and I was listening to an audiobook during a car ride — a middle-grade fantasy that retells a Grimm fairy tale. And of course, the princess’s father died right in the beginning.

My husband complained — he’s tired of all the dead parents of children’s literature. I defended the plot because that’s how stories work. Happy lives make dull books. The main character has to act on her own. She must suffer before she triumphs. She must face conflict.

Still, like my husband, I have tried to shelter my children from some literary losses — we haven’t read Charlotte’s Web or The Bridge to Terabithia. We never watched Bambi. We haven’t read the gruesomest Grimm tales that fascinated me as a child — the murdered stepson served as stew, the barrel studded inside with nails.

I remember my daughter flipping through my copy of Sing-Song, A Nursery Rhyme Book by Christina Rossetti. She was attracted by the little girl on the cover cavorting with a lamb, one of the gorgeous original illustrations by Arthur Hughes, the Pre-Raphaelite whose illustrations for George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin.

Read the rest of the post on Project Mayhem >>