The Hub

Kat, your book sounds excellent to me.

I'm pretty old too -- old enough to have grown up at a time when people thought children were too frail even to deal with the Big Bad Wolf. In the version of Little Red Riding Hood I grew up with, he didn't eat the kid and her grandma -- just locked them in the closet! (And ate the basket of goodies, that evil wretch...)

When I was a teenager I found out how the story was supposed to go, and wondered why the adults in my life believed I was such a weak, pathetic thing that I couldn't handle a storybook wolf. Also by that age, all the kids in my class were swooning over Dark Shadows.

Darkness and sadness and tragedy and fear all exist. Parents would love to make them go away, if not for ourselves, at least for our children. But that's not going to happen, so it's our responsibility to teach them to cope. And what are kids' books, if not a way to do that?