The secret door. Because children’s books are a very serious thing, Mac Barnett, Terre di mezzo
“The first readings come at a fundamental moment in a child’s experience with books. From the beginning of his life, reading is a social activity: the adults he respects, and often even loves, tell him stories, and sometimes the whole family or class listens to them together. The book is a shared experience that binds him even more closely to the most important people in his life.
Then comes the moment when the adults say to him: “You know this thing we used to do together? Now you have to do it alone. And you should like it too.” It is precisely here that young readers must be dazzled with the many joys and riches of literature!”.
These days the bookshop shelves are filling up with the titles we have selected for our summer reading recommendations, this year we have thought of everyone, from nursery school to secondary school children.
Novels of all genres, comics, illustrated books, prose and poetry, the bookshop is full of stories and books that we bookshops have particularly loved in the last year.
As Barnett suggests, we dedicate great attention to first readings, to books intended for the first cycle of primary school, a delicate and of primary importance moment in the growth path of a reader.
Mac Barnett’s essay, just released exclusively in Italy by Terre di mezzo editore, is a very precious text for those who work to create meeting opportunities between books and children. Barnett generously recounts his family experience as a child reader and as a person who at a certain point began to deal with children and young people as an educator. He observed them with great acuity and sensitivity, reworking the experiences he recounts in the book, building a truly convincing vision of what books for children should be like and how we adults should approach them in general. The book can be read in a breeze, it is disarming in its clarity and I closed it feeling strengthened and supported in my opinions not only as regards the first readings.
We recommend reading this book to everyone. Teachers, parents, curious adults. It is a reading that calls into question but from which one emerges full of hope that everything is possible, even raising happy readers.
