Sweet Books Can Cause Cavities
Does hardship breed unbearably sweet children?
The many older hand me down books I read as a child send that message loud and clear. They don’t tell stories of sweet children cast into misery. Instead, they tell stories of miseries which somehow make children sweet.
From the perspective of these books, low standards are excellent practice for a happy life. By extension, the children who suffer privation should be grateful for the inherent lesson. The message: Appreciate what you have and make a game out of hardship. From a practical perspective, it makes sense.
You will be happy more often if you allow more things to make you happy.
Which would be a nauseatingly Pollyanna-like observation if anyone still remembered Pollyanna. Does anyone?
For those of my readers who don’t, Pollyanna, the main character in the eponymous book, focuses her entire being on seeing the good in any situation. If Pollyanna faces certain death by being dropped off a mountain top, she will find a way to be grateful for the view. I guess she nauseates me in retrospect. But at the time I read Pollyanna I considered her not only brave but ingenious in her attempts to make the best of everything.
The Five Little Peppers, an intensely saccharine bunch are even worse. All five children in the Pepper family behave dutifully, honestly, cheerfully and industriously at all times. Although they live a hand to mouth existence with their overworked and inhumanly patient single mother, they never complain. Complaint as a concept simply doesn’t exist in the world the Peppers live in.
Still, I loved those books as a child even while I understood that level of determined optimism was likely to send me into a diabetic coma.
Everyone should be loved more than they deserve. Even books. Which books do you love more than they deserve to be loved?
Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.
