{"id":23806,"date":"2025-07-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23806"},"modified":"2025-07-19T15:35:32","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T20:35:32","slug":"quick-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23806","title":{"rendered":"Quick Six"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I recently crossed six more books off the <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?page_id=23112\">BBC&#8217;s Top 100 Children&#8217;s Books list<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>The Giving Tree<\/em> by Shel Silverstein: I remember once thinking that that story of <em>The Giving Tree<\/em>, which I&#8217;d at least heard about if not actually read myself, was cute. Now, the story irritates me. It&#8217;s about a tree that sacrifices everything&#8211;fruit, branches, and ultimately it&#8217;s very trunk&#8211;for the human that it loves. I can&#8217;t help but read it now as a tale of thoughtless human greed and destruction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Goodnight Moon<\/em> by Margaret Wise Brown: This is another book that I was familiar with but maybe hadn&#8217;t officially read. It&#8217;s super basic, just a description of a room and its contents, followed by pages saying goodnight to those things. It&#8217;s not very exciting, but the pictures are charming, and it works for kids, which is all that really matters.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Snowy Day<\/em> by Ezra Jack Keats: The story isn&#8217;t much (a kid goes outside and plays in the snow), but the art is wonderful. There&#8217;s nothing more adorable than little Peter going on snowy adventures in his red, pointy-hatted snowsuit.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Julian Is a Mermaid<\/em> by Jessica Love: In this book, young Julian sees some people dressed as mermaids, which inspires him to be a mermaid, too. He creates his own mermaid costume, and then his abuela takes him to a parade where other people are also dressed as beautiful sea creatures (apparently it&#8217;s the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, which I didn&#8217;t even know existed). This book is something of a shocker. It&#8217;s unusual for children&#8217;s books to depict little boys in their underwear, never mind transforming into mermaids. Personally, I think it&#8217;s wonderful, a book for a new and better age in which every child is accepted for who they are. But some people prefer to live in the dark past, and I didn&#8217;t have to look very hard online to find articles about the book being challenged. It was challenged a few years ago in a Connecticut school, actually. Sometimes my home state stinks, but the school ultimately kept the book, and good on them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Gruffalo<\/em> by Julia Donaldson: A cute story about a mouse who uses tricks to avoid being eaten by predators, including one very scary predator that he didn&#8217;t even know was real.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Tiger Who Came to Tea<\/em> by Judith Kerr: In this adorable book, a mother and daughter are having tea when a tiger comes to visit. They let him join their tea party, and he proceeds to drink and eat everything in the house (except the people, fortunately!). Loved it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently crossed six more books off the BBC&#8217;s Top 100 Children&#8217;s Books list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,285],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23806"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23806"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23813,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23806\/revisions\/23813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}