Mitali Perkins - Steeped in Stories: Timeless Childrens Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls

Praise for Steeped in Stories: Timeless Childrens Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls

Mitali Perkinss winsome way with words seeps through every page of this useful guide thats so much more than a guide. Her love of classic writing, even with all its flaws, serves as a compass for us to navigate the ins and outs of timeless stories so that they do more than entertain our modern craving for amusement.

Tsh Oxenreider, author of At Home in the World and Shadow and Light

Beautifully crafted, carefully researched, Steeped in Stories is a requisite immersion for all who enter the domain of childrens literature.

Rita Williams-Garca, New York Timesbestselling author and three-time National Book Award finalist

Steeped in Stories is a timely exploration of timeless classics, clear-eyed about cultural blind spots, yet still enchanted by the wisdom, beauty, and wonder of these marvelous stories. This is one of the most brilliant guides to childrens literature Ive read.

Karen Swallow Prior, professor and author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

Stories have always been a place to escape when the world is overwhelming, and we need their refuge now more than ever. Mitali Perkins has given us such a gift in this collection.

Jennifer Fulwiler, standup comic and bestselling author of Your Blue Flame

Required reading for anyone who deigns to proffer an opinion on childrens books written long ago.

Betsy Bird, author, librarian, reviewer, and coauthor of Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Childrens Literature

The best critics are those who inspire us to read more; Mitali Perkins has long been one of my favorite thinkers in the childrens book world. Steeped in Stories is giving me to see how her deep faith informs her secular reading.

Roger Sutton, editor in chief, The Horn Book

Savor this feast of storytelling and be refreshed!

Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary

Mitali Perkins is both a thoughtful storyteller and a wise guide who models how to mine for riches while recognizing the fools gold in these beloved childhood classics.

Sarah Arthur, author of A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine LEngle, author of A Wrinkle in Time

This book is a pure delight and a fierce testament to the power of stories to instruct and beguile. Perkins affectionately invites us to rediscover the virtues of the classics, while at the same time challenging us to think critically about their flaws.

Lna Roy, director of teen programs at Writopia Lab and coauthor of Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time by Her Granddaughters

Steeped in Stories beautifully uncovers for readers how healing and helpful reading childrens classics can be at any age, stage, or season of life.

Keri Wilt, writer, speaker, podcast host, and great-great-granddaughter of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden

Mitali Perkins

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

STEEPED IN STORIES

Timeless Childrens Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls

Copyright 2021 Mitali Perkins. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc..

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB) New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design: Olga Grlic

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6910-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6911-9

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

M y lifelong love of childrens books begins on a humid summers day in Flushing, Queens. Our family, newly immigrated from Kolkata, India, is unpacking suitcases in a small, stuffy apartment. I am seven years old, bored of settling in and grumpy.

Baba throws one of my older sisters a look, and Sonali reaches out a hand.

Lets go, she says.

We walk ten blocks to a large, stately building. People are coming and going so freely that I wonder if they all live here. But after my sister signs us up at the front desk, she leads me into a room full of books, books, and more books.

You can choose seven to take home and read, she tells me.

For free? I ask, wide-eyed.

You have to return them, she says. But then you get to pick seven more.

I rarely missed a weekly visit after that. The childrens section of the Queens Public Library felt like Ali Babas cave. Life grew more stressfulmoney was tight, our parents argued, my older sisters tested age-old boundaries that constrained the lives of good Bengali girlsbut I had a safe retreat. Clutching a book, I slipped out of our bedroom window to the fire escape outside. Ahhh! The sounds, smells, and sights of the city street below me dissipated. I was no longer trapped in chronological time nor in geographical space. I was visiting Jo and her sisters in nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts, entering Narnia with Lucy and meeting Mr. Tumnus, sitting in Matthews buggy as Anne made her way to Green Gables.

Perhaps you, too, remember the magic of vanishing into books as a child. You might have made your escape with a flashlight under the covers in bed or in another secret nook, but a book was your salve of choice. Back then, we consumed stories with both heart and mind engaged, fluidly crossing borders of culture and history. Immersing ourselves in many worlds, we grew in the skill of imagining other lives. In her now classic Horn Book essay Against Borders, Hazel Rochman explains why stories have this mysterious power to build community: They can break down borders. And the way that they do that is not with role models and recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives of others. A good story lets you know people as individuals in all their particularity and conflict; and once you see someone as a persontheir meanness and their couragethen youve reached beyond stereotype.

Out on that fire escape, I was hovering between two worldsour apartment, which was basically still a Bengali village, and the overwhelming bustle and noise of New York City. Stories reduced the heat of life between cultures to a manageable simmer; its likely they lowered the stress levels in your childhood as well. Dont you miss the peace that a good story left behind in your soul? Childrens books can still do that good work for adults. Think of childrens books as literary vodka, author Katherine Rundell writes in