I’m always a little trepidatious when I decide to re-read a book I loved as a kid. Will the magic still be there for adult me, or will it have disappeared with my childhood? Fortunately, most of them have held up for me: The Giver, Wizard of Oz, The Golden Compass, Harry Potter, On Fortune’s Wheel… Every once in a while, though, I re-read a childhood favorite and it just doesn’t hold up. Not only does adult me not love the book, sometimes I don’t even like it anymore.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
This is the strongest example I have of this phenomenon. How I wish I loved this book as an adult as much as I did when I was a kid. I re-read it as an assignment while an undergraduate, and it didn’t even feel like the book I remembered. The story in my memory was much less piecemeal (the book now feels like more of a short story collection than a novel) and much less didactic. Alcott’s narrative voice intruded so much it pretty much ruined the experience for me. As an adult, I felt like I was being taught lesson after lesson. None of that came through to me as a child, and I wonder just how oblivious I was at the age I first read it. It seems so overbearing to me now.
Forever by Judy Blume
I think almost all women who were teens after 1975 have fond memories of covertly reading this book. Perhaps it was hidden under your bed, or passed around at slumber party, or shared at the lunch table amid many giggles (in my case). A friend brought it to school and had dog-eared the interesting bits (one word: Ralph). The next natural step was to hunt down the book at the public library, which had it in the adult section at the time. (I looked it up in the library’s catalog today, expecting to see that it had been moved to YA, but both copies are still in adult.) Honestly, it’s not that racy, but it was certainly the raciest thing I had read so far. On re-read, I mostly just found the book a little dull. As an adult, I’m not into teen romances, and there wasn’t much to hold my interest here. Plus, since I had read plenty of adult romances by the time I re-read it, the interesting bits weren’t so interesting anymore.
These are my two most prominent examples. Other books I’ve re-read have been disappointing, but my opinion on them hasn’t been reversed quite so strongly. And in both Little Women‘s and Forever‘s defense, I can remember why child/teen Kimberly liked them so much, and I can understand why they are important books.
Do you have any childhood favorites that failed to live up to your memories of them upon re-read?
I re-read a few Lois Duncan books last year and they were terrible! I was so disappointed that I decided not to read Stranger with my Face, which was my favorite. Since then, I have been really careful with my re-reading!
PS. Little Women was always a snore for me…maybe because my parents made me go to Louisa May Alcott summer camp in Concord, MA as a child!
I think I had a similar experience with Forever. I remember reading it and thinking how racy it was when I was younger (and I probably read it when I was 10 or 11) but when we had to reread it in our ya lit class, it was nothing of what I remembered it to be.
I can't say I've reread a lot of childhood favorites, but I carry the fear of rereading books I fell in love with in high school and even in college and finding the magic gone. Maybe because I was a big literary fiction reader and now, I'm much less enamored with it than I once was.
& I've never read Little Women!
Wind in the Willows. I remember adoring this as a child, but I re-read it about a year ago and could barely finish it. It made me so sad!
Little Women is one of the books that I have been considering re-reading, since It's probably been about 35 years since I first read it. Now I'm more interested, after reading your thoughts.
Also, I just have to mention, I re-read a book that I read when I was a very young (innocent) teen that I remember made me blush, and I hid it from my parents so they wouldn't know I was reading it, and upon re-reading, all they did was lay in bed and kiss! I can't believe I thought that book was risqué!
It's a good reminder for me, now that I'm a high school librarian, that sometimes I need to (try to) remember what it was like to be that young….and maybe re-reading some books from when we were that age can help.
I had the same reaction to "Little Women." I adored it as a child. Nowadays? Meh. I'm kind of tempted to avoid re-reading anything I loved as a child. I don't want to tarnish those memories! (Case in point: Christopher Pike. I loved his books. I'm sure if I read them now, I'll find them not nearly as scary as I thought they were.)
One of my friends was just talking about Christopher Pike (the title is escaping me right now) and how much the book Between by Jessica Warman was an updated version of one of his classics. Which…actually sort of makes me want to go read the Pike book and see.
I've been re-reading a lot of Christopher Pike over the alst year or so — for me they hold up. They aren't 'scary' but I still find them over-the-top thrilling, which I think is the same thing I enjoyed about them as a kid.
I think one thing that's important to remember is that YA books are actually WRITTEN FOR TEENAGERS. There's so much crossover now, with adults reading YA books (I'm one of them!), that there is almost an expectation that they appeal to both audiences. But the reality is that I was DIFFERENT when I was teenager. I cared about different things, and in different ways. Not all books have to have that crossover appeal.
Though I agree that, yes, it is sad to go back and read something you realize you no longer love. For me it was Peter Pan. I reread it again a couple years ago and kind of really hated it. Peter Pan just seemed like a jerk!
I never read FOREVER… as a kid, but I read it last month, researching "first sex" in YA (other book suggestions most welcome). It misses its mark as literature if you've already had sex. There's no real plot; it's sort of an allegory (I can't think of a better word) about first love and falling out of love. It's here to tell kids, "Sex is okay, sex is somewhat complicated, you'll grow into it," which is a useful message, but you have to hear it young to find it fascinating without a larger story surrounding the message. Stylistically, the copious use of ellipses drove me batty. Even the title has ellipses, which I guess is truth in advertising. And there were instances where the narrative slipped between past and present by accident. I want all iconic novels to be perfectly copyedited after 35 years! No excuses.
One of my teens just finished Forever (actually, I think she's maybe 20, so not technically a teen anymore). She told me she related to this one really hard, and that it was really nice to have another Blume book to read and relate to after going so long since reading her younger ones when she was younger.
I thought it was a really interesting comment because she has read a lot of current contemporary stuff, but yet she still related to it. I reread it when I was 23, so just a couple years older than her, and I felt so much differently.
I've actually never read either Little Women or Forever, but the Book I Loved as a Child That Didn't Hold Up for me is Castle in the Attic. Fourth-grader me thought it was such an enchanting and exciting fantasy tale; I read it again a year or so after graduating college because I suddenly remembered it existed and felt nostalgic, and I was, to say the least, extremely disappointed. The book was short, the story simple, and it just didn't have the excitement that fourth-grader me thought it had.
hmm…I haven't reread Forever. But I only read Little Women as an adult. I was surprised too by how 'preachy' it seemed to be. The story didn't flow as smooth as I had been lead to believe by movies. Though, I will say that I did enjoy the book. But probably because I didn't have the previous experience.
Fortunately, (and I don't know what this says about me), The Baby-sitters Club totally holds up for me as an adult.
I haven't re-read these in a while but I'm kind of afraid to–what happens if I don't like them as much as I did when I was kid?
WOW – I had the SAME reaction to Little Women. I loved it as a kid, loved it to pieces, but reading it again, it is. So. PREACHY.
I had a similar reaction to "A Little Princess" – I still enjoy it because of the very fulfilling ending and the descriptions, but the heroine is such a Mary Sue, which is why I continue to love The Secret Garden because Mary Lennox is such a little brat at the start! 😀
And I still like Anne of Green Gables (I even liked TWO of the sequels, which nobody else here in Canada does, haha).
That's exactly how I felt about the Narnia books. I thought they were so exciting when I was a kid and then when I reread them a few years ago I got so sick of getting hit in the head over and over again with all the Christian allegory.
Now I'm very scared to reread Little Women because I loved it so much growing up. Although Anne of Green Gables has held up for me & that's pretty sickly sweet.
The Mixed Up Files held up fine, what was slightly disappointing was my first trip to NYC 40 years after the book was written. Not even the cafe at the museum is the same 😉
Little Women worked for me on re-read, but I think I was prepared because of some earlier experiences that did not work for the adult me at all. I read and re-read The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright, set in my state, as a teenager, and Christy by Catherine Marshall. At the time they were both lovely books set in hill countries. As an adult, they were unbearably preachy.
In reading all of these comments and thinking about this today, I wonder how much goes back to how books that were written in our childhood (or given to us then) were written with the purpose of message and preaching. Now, that's not the goal. If anything, it's almost the opposite of today's kid lit.
We're reading Little Women in my book club in the fall and I'll be interested to see what I think about it this time around.
I LOVED A Wrinkle in Time when I read it five years ago, but then I reread it a couple years later for a class at UT and didn't care for it much at all. Weird that it changed for me SO quickly.
This happened for me with A Wrinkle in Time. I'm wishing I had never reread it, because I had such strong feelings and associations with it as a kid. As an adult, I was really disappointed in it.
I have a collection of Louisa May Alcott books – including some of her short story collection, which are really preachy but I love them anyways. Of course, I also have a collection of Elsie Dinsmore. Yes, I reread them periodically. I have a hard time thinking of anything I loved as a child and "grew out of" later as an adult. I think this is because I read such a huge and weird sampling of books. I never really went through a period of reading just one thing – I read L. M. Boston and Freddy the Pig, Foxes' Book of Martyrs and Josephus, Ellis Peters and Patricia Wentworth, Boxcar Children, Pamela Service, Eleanor Cameron…when I was a teen I used to go to the library, pull out stacks of picture books, and read through them. There are books that I've read so many times I don't feel the need to read them again.
Monica Edinger's tweet just reminded me that THE WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE was an all-time favorite, and when I re-read it as an adult I still enjoyed it, although it didn't feel as real and immediate to me. I remember feeling like I could hear the wolves howling when I was a kid, but I was less transported as an adult.