‘animals are ideal partners and accomplices’ and friendships with them are partnerships
‘with a being who, like [the child reader], is an outsider, yet in front of whom he can
show off, like Mowgli’: this is a ‘pretext for the invasion of a free society based on
different relationships from those...familiar to children ...free from restraints from
adults’. She goes on: ‘as an intruder in the animal societies of his book, the child has
the unique experience of perfect psychological balance’ (Jan 1973:86–87). We find this
kind of relationship in many successful children’s books, like Black Beauty, Charlotte’s
Web, and National Velvet, but we also find it in many animal books intended for adults
but adopted by children, and this is why they are adopted.
Examples include Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony,
Barry Hines’s Kes, and Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. The realism, pathos,
integrity of the animals and the painfully growing self-awareness of these stories, and in
O’Hara the high emotion, stay well within the experiential and emotional compass of
most young people, and satisfy Jan’s criteria. In considering what animal stories
children adopt, a look at the most commercially successful corpus of talking animals,
those of Walt Disney, is also informative. Why works like Bambi and The Rescuers, The
Jungle Book, and the rest have been so widely popular, and what the Disney adaptations
have entailed is highly relevant.
Another area is that of the western, where traditional writers like Zane Grey and Max
Brand, Ernest Haycox and J.T.Edson continue to attract wide child readerships.
Adoption can be interpreted here in two ways. The first is when children adopt a
particular work or theme or hero as their own in a work originally intended for adults.
The second is when books intended for children in the first place deal with a similar
theme or event as any adult book in the same genre might. Demonstrating the first is
Jack Schaefer’s Shane, adopted perhaps because a small boy is the lens through which
this stark story of a frontier war between ranchers and sod-busters is portrayed. In the
same vein is Owen Wister’s The Virginian, probably one of the most influential of books
in the genre, creating the romantic image of the cowboy, instinctively noble, a man
among boys, and winner in the gripping fight with the villain Trampas. In this and in
countless films characterisation and iconography is thoroughly accessible to the child
reader/ viewer. It offers familiarity and simple gratifications, more simple indeed than
can be found in some works ostensibly for children like Elliott Arnold’s The Spirit of
Cochise, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die,
and Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion, which ask much more of a reader in terms of
constructing coherent meanings. This is a good instance of where adoption of popular
adult fiction may serve as a light relief to the more demanding works which young
people find on their library shelves. The motive to adopt such books is also based on the
wish to assert adult privileges, and access a range of materials which, in writers like Dee
Brown and Brian Holmes, deal with adult themes in an adult way.
Adoption, Adaptation and MediationSome adult books are adopted by children. Some adult books are adapted for children,
and this is often because adults believe that such books should be made available to
children. In some cases, like Robinson Crusoe, the motivation to get children to read it
422 BOOKS ADOPTED BY CHILDREN