The Reedy List

My son had a best friend in first grade who moved away mid-year. He did not talk about it much. He was six and did not yet have the language for grief or loss or the particular loneliness of a desk that used to belong to someone you liked. But I could see it in him — a quietness that had not been there before, a reluctance to invest in new friendships that might also disappear. We were reading together one evening — a picture book about a character who had been left behind, who did not understand why the world had rearranged itself without asking permission — and my son looked up from the page and said "that's how I feel about Timmy." He could not have said it directly. He had tried and the words had not come. But the character found them for him. That moment is the one I return to every time someone asks me why I write fantasy for children. Not because fantasy is escapism — though it can be — but because the right story creates exactly enough distance from a child's ...

  My son loved stories long before he could read them independently. When he was in second grade and struggling with reading comprehension, picture books became our bridge. Not remedial tools — bridges. The right story at the right moment gave him something no worksheet ever could — a character whose experience mirrored his own, a world where his feelings made sense, and a conversation starter that felt safe because it was about someone else first. I watched him process his own frustration through characters he loved. I watched him find words for experiences he had no language for. I watched story do what direct conversation could not — create just enough distance from the hard feeling that it became possible to approach it. A child who will not say "I feel like I'm failing" will absolutely say "that's how the character felt when nobody believed in him." That observation changed everything about how I thought about children's books — and it is ultimately...