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Emergent Literacy: Children's Books from 0 to 3. Edited by Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2011.
Reviewed by Glenna Sloan
Writing to the New York Times in response to an article published on 8 October 2010, Shelly Harwayne, former teacher, principal, and school superintendent, pointedly includes a quotation from a universally beloved picture book: "Your article about the decline of picture book reading made me have a 'terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.'" Others, equally appalled-among them writers, psy- chologists, literacy experts, parents, and grandparents-joined her in commenting on what they considered a scary story. In the article, "Picture Books, Long a Staple, Lose Out in the Rush to Read," publishers claimed that picture books, holding limited value for children, were no longer in wide demand. Quoted in the piece were parents who, perhaps already anticipating the stiff competition for acceptance into the best colleges, were eager to have their toddlers read pages thick with text and so had turned to chapter books. "Parents are saying, 'My kid doesn't need books with pictures,'" declared the publisher of Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers.
The vast majority of those writing letters to the editor in response to this article were lay people of all ages and backgrounds, not experts in literacy development. Yet they spoke passion- ately in defense of the picture book's worth. One letter writer argued, "Rushing our children into chapter books is like teaching multiplication before our kids know how to count. Bring back those picture books, and our...