THE LONELY DOLL BY DARE WRIGHT | books, yo.
Dolls can be intrinsically disturbing anyway – those blank fixed faces – but that one is particularly bad. I don’t know how much of our own hang-ups we project onto those images but I don’t know that I would ever have felt comfortable with that book!
Yeah I agree; some of that certainly goes on in relation to the book [and all children’s art and literature and so on], especially the spanking image. But there is undeniably real oddness in this, just in terms of the decisions the author made.
I’ve never heard of this book – so I looked it up. 1957. I guess it was ground-breaking in its day because of the use of photos in a children’s book? My recollection of books in my childhood is that they had black-and-white drawings, by artists like Edward Ardizzone. I gather from its Wikipedia entry that it’s a collectible now.
I’m sorry you had a deprived childhood. I didn’t have a lot of books, but I always got one on my birthday and at Christmas, and my father took me to the local library every Saturday morning. I don’t remember him reading to me, but that’s because I was proud of being able to read and didn’t want him to… But I developed the habit of talking to him about my books and I kept that up all my life until he died.
Sorry for the delay, I’m terrible at replying to comments. Yeah I guess it probably was. I think it’s a strange book in many ways but that’s what makes it interesting. My mother reads a lot now but, as with most things, our taste is completely different. I don’t remember her reading at all when I was younger.
MY parents were completely different in that way. He was a great reader, she wasn’t.