Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up Book

Unsettled by the fact that her twelve-year-old son, an ardent reader, hated most of the books assigned to him in school, Barbara Feinberg set out to discover just what kids are reading these days. Much to her dismay, she found that novels about abandonment, kidnapping, abuse, and more have become standard fare in many middle school classrooms.Pre-adolescents, these novels seem to suggest, ought to be confronted in fiction with "real life problems" straight on, with no magical dimension and limited imaginative scope. In fact, the child characters in these books often must face their stark circumstances nearly alone, without adult shelter. You have only yourself, these novels seem to say. Adults cannot help you; they are often the source of your troubles.Weaving literary analysis with memoir, told in a playful, elegiacal style, Welcome to Lizard Motel sets its inquiry into books and stories in the context of an unfolding narrative of family life. And as the narrative takes on a novel-like velocity of its own, stories become the lens through which Feinberg reflects on our own notions of childhood—both observed and remembered, our culture"s rendering of childhood, and the surprising disconnect between the two.Read More