Here in the Mollmann household, we're big fans of children's author Mac Barnett, particularly his collaborations with illustrator Jon Klassen. The first one we ever read was Extra Yarn, which I believe my mother purchased for us when we were pregnant with Kid One. It's a really good book, with a good sense of tone and pace, and it's very fun to read aloud. But the list of strong picture books he's written is quite long: Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, Count the Monkeys, the "Shapes" trilogy, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse, How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?, President Taft Is Stuck in the Bath, and so on. Kid One is also a fan of the graphic novel series Barnett writes with illustrator Shawn Harris, The First Cat in Space... and for which Barnett and Harris also provide original soundtrack albums!
My friend Christiana, who has a child around the age of my own, and with whom I often swap picture book recommendations, is also a Mac Barnett fan. The two of us were thus very appreciative when the Library of Congress named him the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. From the publicity photos released to accompany this, we learned that Mac Barnett is a good-looking guy! (Me, when the LOC Instagram account served her a photo she characterized as a "thirst trap": "The algorithm knows what you want and it is smoldering pictures of Mac Barnett.")
If you follow the world around children's literature, you will know that Mac Barnett got himself into trouble earlier this year, when he released his new book for adults about children's literature, Make Believe. Christiana texted me about it right away: "Evidently someone on social media blasted a decontextualized sentence from his book for adults on writing and now the Internet is going scorched earth."
The sentence in question was that Mac Barnett first cited Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud." He then went on to say, "I have a nagging fear that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole. So I now offer Barnett’s Addendum to Sturgeon’s Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud."
Many people got very mad about this. It was perhaps an unwise statement for the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature to go around making. But, as Christiana said to me:
But if you count ALL picture books, I don't think it would be at all hard to find nine junk ones for every good one. Think about:
- all the AI slop
- all the cash-grab holiday books
- all the IP tie-in nonsense
- all the "gift books" with cute pictures and no content
- almost every book published by random celebrities
- all the books that are just TV episodes awkwardly printed
I feel like all the outrage assumes he is making aesthetic judgments about books that some people like and some don't, but the market is flooded with stuff no one would ever think of let alone defend.
As a parent who owns a lot of picture books, has gotten a lot of picture books from the library, and has read a lot a lot of picture books aloud to my children... I cannot disagree! So many books are written by people who don't even know how rhythm and meter work yet insist on trying to use it (e.g., Chris Ferrie); so many are clearly written for the parents to feel good about themselves, not children to enjoy (e.g., Chris Ferrie); so many are just PAW Patrol episodes you have to suffer through all over again in the format of a book.
A lot of the response seemed to be ascribing to Barnett something I couldn't actually see in the excerpts from Make Believe that got posted on social media, that he was against the way children's literature had gotten more diverse. Here's a typical response, from the author Tracey Baptiste: (I am going to quote the whole thing, because she wrote it in the world's most annoying format for an essay, a series of facebook photos, and thus it's not very accessible)
“I have a nagging fear that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.” – Mac Barnett
This is a quote from Barnett’s new book about children’s literature.
The remark feels incendiary because it’s designed to provoke an emotional response. It references a 1956 quote from Theodore Sturgeon that 90 percent of science fiction is crud. Sturgeon’s point was that most of the output from any field is mediocre.
The quote is rhetorical, but timing and position matter. Children’s books are under sustained political attack and this statement from someone holding an official, visible role in children’s literature does not land as neutral critique, especially in an environment where quotes are routinely stripped of context, and without context it can cause real collateral damage.
Besides, this is not data. These are arbitrary numbers based on two dudes’ vibes. What’s their definition of “crud” anyway?
Barnett is side-eyeing didactic books, but who defines what that is? Books have points of view. Who decides what’s worth saying or how it should be said?
Historically, children’s publishing gatekeepers have kept out a lot of creators from marginalized communities. Diverse books were criticized for lack of “believability” or “universality.” Even when they were accepted, there was a narrow view of what stories non-white, non-Christian creators could tell. It wasn’t until 2014 when We Need Diverse Books was founded that the industry began to diversify because they were forced to. True equity remains elusive, especially since diversity gains have receded in the last few years as a response to the political climate.
TO BE CLEAR, I’M NOT SAYING THAT ANYONE IS EQUATING DIVERSE BOOKS WITH CRUD.
I am saying that a very small group of people have always decided what is worthy. This 94.7% feels similarly stingy.
But also? Why up Sturgeon’s percentage an additional 4.7%? Children’s books are already looked down on by publishing in general. Why was the previous arbitrary number deemed not large enough?
This is not a great time in children’s publishing. Book banning, the rise of AI-produced stories, classroom teachers under pressure, libraries under scrutiny, educators being fired for standing up for books, reduced and cancelled school visits, recent losses of publishing imprints squeezing an already small field into one with ever fewer resources, and even imprints within children’s literature bashing other books...it’s all making the work of telling stories exhausting.
So many of my colleagues are tired. We’re struggling with our love of telling stories against the very real mental challenge of working in an environment that seems to barely value us.
Every Tuesday, books are being published. So many, that it’s almost impossible to gain any traction on a single title. Yet, creators are judged on whether their books do gain traction. On top of that having the current ambassador for children’s literature make this comment is not just careless—it’s foreseeably harmful. When authority figures speak, their words travel farther and are harder to counter, especially when stripped of context.
Book banners do not engage with nuance. They already pull isolated lines from books to justify challenges. A line declaring that “94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud” is not a hypothetical misuse waiting to happen—it is exactly the kind of soundbite that thrives in this environment.
(By the way, if the last sentence of Tracey Baptiste's rant isn't written by AI, then I don't know anything about AI writing. Pangram agrees.)
Sure, she has that big all caps disclaimer, but the overall tone of her rhetoric is that Mac Barnett's statement is in some way anti-diversity. She wasn't alone in this opinion; a widely circulated (but now taken down) petition included the statement, "For Black and brown authors, for queer and trans authors, we have seen that very word [didacticism] used as a cudgel and dog whistle to decry the necessary diversification of children’s literature."
In my opinion this is a real stretch. Mac Barnett is anti-crap. And there are indeed some crappy didactic pro-diversity books (e.g., Antiracist Baby), but crappy children's books can be found in every niche of the children's book market.
Well, that's what I thought Barnett was saying anyway... only I (much like Tracey Baptiste or any of the signatories of the letter) had not actually read the book! So I requested it from my local library. This was back in May... and I did not get my copy until late September. I guess the brouhaha did him some good! (He had to issue an apology, but he wasn't fired as National Ambassador or anything, and of course the bloodthirsty mob on social media has moved on.)
My intention was just to read enough of it to find the context for the out-of-context snippet shared on social media, but the book is very short (just 98 pages including Acknowledgements) and very fun, and so I ended up reading the whole thing in probably thirty minutes. It's not a critical analysis of children's literature or anything; it's more of a manifesto for how Barnett thinks children's lit should be written with some anecdotes about Margaret Wise Brown and a lot of (as will be no surprise to anyone who has ever read a Mac Barnett's picture book) very good jokes, including a Jon Klassen cameo. I don't see how anyone could read this book and come away with the opinion that Mac Barnett is attacking children's literature. Mac Barnett is defending children's literature because he loves it.
Here's some of the context around that much-circulated quotation: (these two passages are not contiguous)
But a big reason for our low opinion of children’s books is simply that lots of children’s books are bad. Anybody who reads regularly to kids knows this. There are so many bad kids’ books, and kids’ books are bad in so many different ways. There are treacly ones, and preachy ones, and ones that don’t make any sense; books that are supposed to rhyme but don’t; books with amateurish writing, or amateurish illustrations, or both; bland books; boring books.
Another big difference between kids and adults: Adults are more powerful than children. Way more powerful. It’s not even close. Young kids’ dependency on adults is near total. And adults often exercise their power over children in ways that are benevolent, responsible, and even necessary—preventing kids from running into traffic, ensuring that they have dinner. But a child’s imagination is one of the few places where they can experience genuine autonomy. A good children’s book respects this autonomous zone and might even expand its borders. But too many books—sometimes inadvertently but often on purpose—make incursions into children’s imaginations in order to reinforce adult control. I know this may seem like an overblown way to characterize a book about an anthropomorphic banana who learns to share.
If anything, I think the book kind of pulls its punches, because while Barnett mentions a lot of good books, he doesn't single out any bad books. As close as he gets is that comment about the banana—which struck me as a veiled reference to Jory John's seemingly interminable series of books about food items acquiring emotional intelligence. (But if I'm right, then Barnett is vaguebooking a pal, because they cowrote the Terrible Two middle-grade novels.)
I shared those pages with Christiana, and she texted back, "Where is the lie? as they say." (Also she pointed out that if he hasn't read his Perry Nodelman, he's at least independently converged on the same ideas. Nodelman is a bit infamous in kidlit circles for suggesting that children's books are a tool of colonial control by adults.)
If you care about children's literature, either as a scholar and/or as parent who prefers reading good books to crappy ones, it's worth the quick investment of time it will take you to read it. My favorite part was probably the extended metaphor about cool aunts that he uses to explain the different types of kids books, but the book as a whole is quite fun.
I think what strikes me as most damning, though, is that Baptiste and other writers attacking Barnett do the same thing that the book banners they are supposedly defending children's literature against do themselves: read a snippet out of the context in order to attack him! Just like book banners, they are reading selectively and deliberating ignoring nuance and intent.
Weirdly, Baptiste even acknowledges that in what I quoted above... but justifies her own deliberate lack of nuance by claiming that book banners themselves will take Barnett's comment and use it without context to attack children's books. As Christiana said to me, "It's egregious to make the argument that you can't write anything that could be taken out of context and used badly. You might as well just make the argument that you can't write."
I did a bit of searching, and can find no evidence that, say, Moms for Liberty is quoting Mac Barnett in takedowns of pro-LGBT children's books or something. All I could find was one right-wing Wall Street Journal columnist complaining about diversity in children's books... but it seems to me that a right-wing WSJ columnist on the "free expression" beat will find some way to complain about diversity in children's books every week whether Mac Barnett says something or not.
And Baptiste complains this is a bad time to criticize children's literature, when it's under attack from without, but 1) has it ever not been under attack from without? and 2) ...surely the age of AI slop is when children's literature needs passionate criticism of bad books more than ever! Mac Barnett provides just that.
(Fun fact: the cover of Make Believe is by Carson Ellis... wife of Decemberists' lead singer Colin Meloy, as well as illustrator of Meloy's YA novel Wildwood, now a major motion picture. Ellis also illustrated Barnett's picture book What Is Love? and wrote/illustrated her own, Du Iz Tak? My kids found What Is Love? so-so, but enjoyed Du Iz Tak? a lot.)
