According to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie, who also teaches children's literature at Cornell University, the best works in this genre "appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within us all." In this illuminating collection of 16 essays, she examines the masterpieces of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne, J.R.R. Tolkien, T.H. White, and others. In them she finds "other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation." Alison Lurie hits high stride in her commentary on folklore, the role of magic in juvenile literature, and the ecological insights of Richard Adams's Shardik.