Enid Blyton, moral guide

My blog post title is simply following the title of this very interesting article on Enid Blyton.  I highly recommend it.

We have got many dozens of Enid Blyton books here at home.  I loved them as a child.  Mulan and Miya love them.  Blyton's books are among our first chapter books for new readers, and they continue to be loved well into the tween years (or even teen years!).  Whenever we get a new pile of books from a book fair, it is always the Enid Blyton books that get read first.

In other words, there is something about Blyton's books (like Harry Potter, or Roald Dahl) that just seem to appeal.  Her storytelling is simply very, very enjoyable.

But yep, Blyton's morality is sometimes question-raising, and we need to acknowledge those dubious aspects of her moral teaching.  (When I read aloud books to Mulan and Miya, we sometimes discuss together the questionable aspects.)

But nonetheless, the article does a nice job of picking out the morally admirable aspects of Blyton's books -- the bits that make Blyton's books, on the whole, pretty good moral guides for young children.

(There are a few of Blyton's books that I have chosen not to keep, such as the Amelia Jane stories.  Blyton's characters can sometimes be vindictively nasty, but these stories seem to be based entirely around vindictively nasty oneupmanship, and I can't see anything worth keeping in them.)