No witches, no peril … author says kids’ books have lost plot

ONCE upon a time children could rely on the stories they read to thrill, amuse, educate and even scare them.

Now, however, children’s books are being sanitised and dumbed down, according to a best-selling author.

Geraldine McCaughrean, who has written more than 160 books, said there was now a range of topics that are no longer deemed acceptable for young readers.

‘With a book that’s going to be sold into schools you get a list of things that are unacceptable – no witches, no demons, no alcohol, no death, no religion,’ she said yesterday. ‘It really does cut down what you can write about.’

She added: ‘It’s extraordinary because in pre-school you can read fairy tales in their original form and some of them are really scary and dark.

‘But you go to junior school and all of a sudden the fairy tales that you read in school have been sanitised and cleaned up.

‘And then you go into secondary school and fall off into the deep end of vampire books. It must be like falling off a cliff.’

The author, 67, made her comments after winning the UK’s oldest children’s book award, the CILIP Carnegie Medal, for Where The World Ends, a survival story of boys marooned at sea.

Miss McCaughrean, who is known for her official Peter Pan sequel Peter Pan In Scarlet, also claimed the language in children’s books was being dumbed down. ‘They [publishers] will question difficult words, certainly if you’re doing picture books or younger fiction,’ she said.

‘A fellow author was saying the other day that “superb” had to be changed because no child will understand it. But they never will understand it if they don’t read it.

‘I used to get away with murder with complexity of sentences and complex vocabulary and it was never questioned…Now it feels policed against political correctness and difficult language.’

The same applies to books aimed at teenagers, she claimed, with words such as ‘mellifluous’ being rejected.

She used her winner’s speech to attack publishers’ fixation on accessible language, which she called ‘a euphemism for something desperate’.

Warning of the consequences of this approach, she said that publishers would ‘deliberately and wantonly create an underclass of citizens with a small but functional vocabulary: Easy to manipulate and lacking in the means to reason their way out of subjugation, because you need words to be able to think for yourself’.