Stolen Children, Part II 2 comments

By Bradford Winters

Having read the author’s bio of Peg Kehret’s Stolen Children before I even turned to page one, my original intention—to ferret out the book’s nefarious underbelly on behalf of my nine year-old pen pal—felt thwarted at the start. And despite the kind of prose that has the protagonist Amy and her babysitting charge kidnapped at the end of chapter two a mere few pages after her father’s death in a hit-and-run at the end of chapter one, Amy turns out to be quite the plucky heroine whose clever presence of mind and patience with a toddler in that rank, remote cabin should have given me more pause as a parent if it didn’t at the time.

I could do worse than learn a thing or two from Amy Nordlund.

Nevertheless, the title Stolen Children continues to prompt certain darker reflections even after I have finished it with a light-handed stamp of approval.

Naturally, this is where the “When I was a child” part chimes in. But when I was a child of my pen pal’s age—remember, we’re talking about fourth graders here—my exposure to literary crime stopped at The Hardy Boys, and to anything graphic, for that matter, at the onset of female puberty in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Harmless, or even arguably efficacious, as the work of an author like Kehret may be, am I wrong or square or behind-the-times to feel that the story of a young babysitter and toddler kidnapped and videotaped by armed men in a remote woods cabin isn’t exactly what nine year-old D. should be reading in bed at night? Is something pure or untainted in her perhaps being stolen by the very kind of book that features the title in question?

(Stick with me here, as I’m in for a surprising form of correction by the end of this.)

Not that D. thinks so, or is about to part ways with her beloved genre. In the most recent letter to me she writes, with her wide rounded handwriting that breaks my heart:

Also after you read “Stolen Children” I have another book I want you to read. It is called “Deep and Dark and Dangerous” by Mary Downing Hahn. I think you already know that I’m into ghost stories and stuff like scary books: I L♥VE those kinds of books!

Soon enough, no doubt, she’ll be on to the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, and that is where I might very well intervene because, though I know as much as I want to of the series, which is very little, you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that children everywhere aren’t in some ways being robbed or worse by a book like Breaking Dawn, the fourth installment, in which (its reputedly horrible prose aside) one Bella Swan (gag) is knocked unconscious by the overpowering sexual appetite of her vampire husband—rape? au contraire, she goes back for more!—who manages to destroy the headboard but make a vampire baby while he’s at it. Well done, man!

Whether or not her treasured ghost stories turn out to be a kind of gateway drug to the more insidious variations on Count Crackula, I can’t help but feel a bit of paternal concern for D.

(At the same time, with the vampire genre on a rebound of such proportions these days that it begs some form of national psychoanalysis, I’m waiting for the insights of, say, a Jesuit sociologist to put the phenomenon in its proper socio-spiritual perspective. Let me know if you come across one.)

But lest I fall prey to any kind of sugar-coated thinking that would betray the innate psychological realities of childhood, I have my own five year-old daughter to keep me in line. As she’s just learning to read and we’re still in the land of the Little House series for the bedtime stories my wife and I read to her, she’s a long way off from any such books as mentioned above. Therefore I was a bit caught off-guard when she reported this recent dream to me:

“I was outside church and two men trapped me in a car; then I trapped them, and then Mommy came out and called the police.”

In an altogether uncanny kind of way, it seemed as if she had just read the Peg Kehret book and taken her cue from the heroic Amy Nordlund; whether or not this was a case of the Spirit moving in mysterious ways, it seemed as if she were telling me unwittingly—or reminding me, in case I’ve forgotten from my own experience—that there is nothing that happens in Stolen Children that doesn’t first happen in the mind of a five year-old.

(What happens in Breaking Dawn remains another matter.)

So on to Deep and Dark and Dangerous it is. Truth be told, there is little I wouldn’t read for my pen pal after a mere three months of exchanging our monthly letters. The last one came decorated at the borders with pink stars, a heart, and a smiley face all drawn in marker, and closed with this, from a fourth grade girl I haven’t yet met: Love, D.

Right back at you, sweetheart, more than you know at this point, or perhaps ever at all.

Love, B.