Books for Children

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 413, 23 May 1947, Page 11

Books for Children

APPROACHED the 4YA morning session, "Writing for Children;’ in anticipation of a talk about Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne and so on; but found instead that the session was of a much more personal and interesting type, the speaker being Margaret Pearson, author and illustrator of children’s books, who told us of her own experiences in this field of activity. In any bookshop nowadays one can find any number of children’s books, well-produced and wellwritten; but not all of them make a genuine appeal to children. Many of them have obviously been conceived by an adult mind unable to realise what children demand in the shape of read-ing-matter. Obviously the best writer of children’s books is the writer who does it for fun, without consciously attempting to write down to the children’s level, and Margaret Pearson seems to approach her work from this angle. She obviously enjoys every minute of her authorship. I was amused by her naive explanation of why her unsophisticated drawings appeal to. children- "I draw them that way because I can’t draw any better." The author and _illustrator may well be comforted for her professed lack of artistic technique’ by the fact, that other artists have suc-/ ceeded with even less professional equip-ment-James Thurber, for instance.