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Picture Books About School Shooters: Needed or Needlessly Alarming Kids?
Authors who try explain tragedies like Uvalde and Sandy Hook to preschoolers face a risky task
It has come to this: picture books for 4-and 5-year-olds about school shootings.
As the carnage in American classrooms goes on, authors keep trying to find words to explain the inexplicable to children. You can’t blame them for wanting to help: School shootings are on the rise, and the slaughter in Uvalde, Texas, was the deadliest since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.
But serial murder doesn’t doesn’t lend itself well to picture books, typically written for 4-to-8-year-olds and often read by children as young as age 2 or 3. As the eminent children’s literature critic Perry Nodelman has noted, these books “exist primarily so that they can assist in the telling of stories.”
That purpose sits at an odd angle to disasters like school shootings. Picture books may exist to tell stories, but they can’t describe massacres like those in Sandy Hook or Uvalde: That would be too frightening for the preschoolers and others who are their primary readers.
