Forget About Dr. Seuss. My Child Reads Tolstoy.
Alice Hemmer’s favorite part of Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” doesn’t involve the drug-addled cross- country road trips, encounters with prostitutes in Mexico or wild parties in Manhattan. Alice, who is 5 and lives in a Chicago suburb, likes the part when Sal Paradise eats ice cream and apple pie whenever he feels hungry.
She hasn’t actually read Kerouac’s 320-page, amphetamine-fueled classic. Instead, her father read her a heavily abridged and sanitized illustrated version of “On the Road” designed for 6- to 12-year- old children.
“She didn’t love it,” said her father, Kurt Hemmer, an English professor at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, and scholar of the Beat Generation.
“On the Road,” with its recurring references to sex, drugs and domestic violence, might not seem like an ideal bedtime story for a child. But that’s precisely the point of KinderGuides, a new series of books that aims to make challenging adult literary classics accessible to very young readers.
Along with “On the Road,” KinderGuides published picture versions of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
With their bright illustrations and breezy language — “Sal is ready for an adventure!” pretty much typifies the tone of “On the Road” — the books almost seem like parodies, or the perfect gag gift for the hipster parent who has everything. But the Los Angeles-based creators of the series, the graphic designer Melissa Medina and her husband, the writer Fredrik Colting, insist they aren’t joking.
“The goal of all of this is to get them really psyched about these books now, so that they’ll want to read the originals later,” Ms. Medina said.
Kiddie lit has become a surprisingly lucrative and crowded niche. BabyLit, an imprint that publishes board books for babies based on “Anna Karenina,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Don Quixote” and other classics, has sold more than 1.5 million copies of its 24 titles.
Cozy Classics reduces great works of literature to 12-word stories, illustrated with photos of handmade felt figurines. (Its rendition of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” can be rattled off in a single breath: “Sold i er- Fr i ends- Run- Da nce - Goodbye-Hug-Horse-Boom!-Hurt-
Kiddie lit creators say they’re serious; others doubt it.
Sleep-Snow-Love.”)
Some educators are skeptical. “It’s ludicrous to take great works that are clearly for adults and reduce them for children,” said Monica Edinger, a fourth-grade teacher in Manhattan, who dismissed KinderGuides as an attempt to exploit parents’ insecurities.
Some parents counter that children can absorb the themes of works like “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Brent Almond, a parenting blogger who lives in Maryland, said his 7-year- old son, Jon, had responded enthusiastically. “A lot of these books are melancholy or outright depressing, but it’s been cool to see how he reacts to them,” Mr. Almond said.