From: Nina Eliasoph <eliasoph>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 10:39:14 -0500

Just to pipe up for Alice: my daughter is seven and just read most of Alice in Wonderland. When I was her age, I found it creepy, but she just loved the logic conundrums (or whatever the word for them is...). She also loved the way Alice kept arguing with herself--there is the hot-tempered, funny Alice, and the well-mannered, proper Alice, and she argues with herself all the time. How could that NOT appeal to a seven year old who is trying so hard to be good?

I had to explain a lot of reference to things she hasn't experienced or seen, though. This is often the case with old books and movies. I wonder how other people deal with those kinds of references. Sometimes, they're harmless (crocquet, Latin lessons, in Alice in Wonderland), but usually, really good books assume readers' unspoken knowledge of social categories and historical figures and inequalities and injustices of past social orders. You often can't make sense of the plot without that implicit knowledge that earlier readers had, but if you explain it to kids, it can get pretty grim (why the number card people in Alice in Wonderland are worth less than the queen and king, whether kings and queens with crazy, unjust powers still exist, and if not, why governments can still behead people one way or another, were some questions that we meandered onto while reading that book).
Received on Mon 30 Oct 2000 09:39:14 AM CST