I sat down today to write about hope, but the truth is that we live in a fractured and fragile time, and it can be hard to feel hopeful, even with regard to children’s literature.

Here, where I sit in Atlanta, Georgia, the state legislature is poised to curtail and defund the American Library Association, while so many of our best-loved books are being censored nationwide. Meanwhile, across the globe, thousands of children are being killed in Gaza, while other children are still held hostage (we hope) in tunnels underground. And this is only one of many conflicts that threaten our planet. We are in a dark and terrible moment.

When I sat down to write this essay, I wasn’t planning to write about the struggles of our time. I meant to offer something optimistic or nostalgic in celebration of the Horn Book’s centennial. I thought I might look back to 1924, the year that gave us such timeless classics as A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young and Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, both childhood favorites of mine. That would have been nice. But do you know what else was happening in 1924? Benito Mussolini was suppressing newspapers, and Adolf Hitler was released early from prison.

The truth is that the world has always been fragile and fractured, though we are more aware of the details now than we were a hundred years ago. Bad news comes quickly, from all over the planet, through our phones, computers, even our wristwatches. And that can be hard to ignore. Still, despite that fact — or maybe because of it — we write books for kids.

Because what children’s books offer, by nature of their very existence, is hope. There’s no avoiding hope in this business. It’s built into the form. Our books stare deeply into the troubled, unavoidable world and offer kids the truth, but other things too — reasons to grow and play and dance and laugh, despite it all. Children’s books promise a future. They turn the Spanish Civil War into Ferdinand the bull so that we are able to process aggression and violence, but also to rest easily under our own shade trees, enjoy the flowers.

There is a temptation, in the face of all this heaviness, to dismiss this work we do, and quit. What good are bears and bunnies, we might ask ourselves, in the face of fascism, war, and climate change? But I might argue that this moment needs our work more than any other. Precisely because the news cycle never stops, we keep going too. In fact, Ferdinand is exactly what the world needs right now. Not because he teaches kids about war and peace, but because he does more than that. He embodies the peace, lays down in the grass, shows us how.

“It is difficult,” wrote William Carlos Williams, “to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” (“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”). I believe this is true, in my deepest self. I believe that poetry saves lives, and I believe that books for children are poetry, or that they do much the same work. These books we write keep the world grounded, give readers faith, and offer a map to something beyond the news, when they can no longer bear reality. These books — shared in our beds at night, laid across our laps at storytime, or passed between small hands in the ­lunchroom — examine the world, but also translate it, imagine it differently. They remind people what the world can be and return us to our better selves.

I look at the Horn Book and think about all it has seen in a century, all the fragile and fractured moments it has witnessed and weathered and feel a little bit better. So if I have a hope for the future right now, it is this: that we don’t let this particular fractured and fragile moment break us, as others have not. If I am lucky, that hope will propel me forward, into my own next endeavor, with the wish that I might in turn inspire someone else. And so on and so on, for another hundred years. At our best, we — the children’s book world — are a sort of hope machine, a reminder that despair is a failure of imagination, not an inevitable state.

From the May/June 2024 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Our Centennial. For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here. Find more in the "Blowing the Horn" series here.

Single copies of this special issue are available for $15.00 including postage and may be ordered from:

Horn Book Magazine Customer Service
hbmsubs@pcspublink.com

Full subscription information is here.