Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together by Illana Kurshan
If you love children and children’s literature, you have to try Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together. It is my favorite book so far in 2025. Ilana Kurshan, super-writer-mom, gives her readers an expert’s class in how shared stories and literature positively affect the building of family bonds and parents’ connections with their children. As the author says in her introduction:
The story of our family is, in large part, the story of the books we have read. It is a story that takes us from our kitchen table to the park to the secret garden beyond, from Coney Island to Klickitat Street, from Narnia to Neverland to Eden and the Promised Land. Together we have traveled by tesseract, by phantom tollbooth, by Terabithia bridge, and by eagle’s wings. These journeys have taken us to worlds beyond, but also to worlds within. In sharing these books with my children, I have gained intimate access to the breadth of their imagination and the depths of their understanding. Reading together has taught me to draw out their stories, and — in the pages that follow — to share my own. [p. 17]
Illana Kurshan is a gorgeous writer; emotionally honest and perceptive, and unafraid to share with us her ongoing battles. Children of the Book explores how diverse literary works, including the Torah and classic children’s literature, have shaped both the author’s and her children’s understanding of the world and their singular identities. It explores the parallels between biblical narrative, children’s literature, and the challenges and joys of parenthood. One of the many features I loved about this book was the author’s anecdotes about her life in Jerusalem with her husband Daniel and her five children: Matan, Liav, Tagel, Shalvi, and Yitzvi. I’ll close with the following quote—a lengthy one — that shows the talent the author has for using memoir to provide a glimpse into modern motherhood and Jewish life while inspiring a dedication to reading to and with our children.
During a period when Daniel and I squabble more than usual, our five-year-old takes refuge in fairy tales. Every single book she pulls off the library shelves is pink or purple, featuring princesses and unicorns and fairy godmothers. These books are not shelved together; Shalvi makes her way around the room like the prince with his glass slipper, searching them out one by one. Reluctantly I read about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, alongside drawings of petite maidens with cinched waists, dainty wrists, and flowy hair. In every story, the prince and princess live happily ever after.
I am a hopeless romantic. I believe that my potential for greatest happiness lies in exclusive partnership with one other human being. But I can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to get through the traditional fairy tale anymore, nor do I want to leave my daughter with the impression that all it takes for loving partnership is for her to be beautiful and trusting, and for him to be handsome and rich.
I try to present Shalvi with the feminist answer to the fairy tale, hoping she will realize that there are other kinds of princesses, other models of romantic love, other ways of cultivating intimacy. We start with The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, the story of a brave, smart princess who rescues her intended after he is carried off by a fearsome fire-breathing dragon; when he responds impudently to her heroism — he tells her she looks like a mess — she promptly ditches him, and they don’t get married after all. We move on to Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants, about a motorcycle-riding princess who is too cool to get married, so she sets impossible challenges for her suitors that send them all running, leaving her to live happily ever after on her own. Neither my daughter nor I is satisfied with these stories. What use is having one’s pride intact if one is left all alone in the end? Is anyone really too cool for companionship?
And so instead I read her a story in which the acceptance or rejection of marriage is not the final scene but merely a thickening of the plot. In The Queen Who Couldn’t Bake Gingerbread, a German folktale published as an illustrated children’s book in English in 1975, the hapless King Pilaf is in search of a wife. He has very strict criteria for his spouse. As he tells his Lord Chamberlain, she must be beautiful enough to please him and wise enough to help him rule, and she must know how to bake his favorite gingerbread. King Pilaf searches the kingdom, but it seems there is no perfect woman. Finally, the king meets Princess Calliope. She tells him that she is in fact seeking a husband, but he must know how to play the slide trombone, which he does not; nor can she bake gingerbread. However, she is drawn to his kindness, and he to her wisdom, and they decide to get married.
The two do not live happily ever after, at least not yet. One day the king and queen get into a terrible argument. “See?” I tell my daughter. “Husbands and wives argue. Not just in our house.” The king tells his wife that he wishes she knew how to bake his favorite gingerbread; and she tells him that she regrets not marrying someone who could soothe her nerves with the music of a slide trombone. But thanks to the intervention of the goodly Lord Chamberlain, all is not lost. After several scorched pots, the king learns to bake his own gingerbread; and after sounding at first like an elephant blowing its nose, the queen learns to play the slide trombone.
I can abide the “happily ever after” of King Pilaf and Queen Calliope because it celebrates the partnership of mutually respecting equals, and the maturity that can develop within a relationship. King Pilaf and Queen Calliope learn the important lesson that we can’t expect to change the other person, but we can change ourselves and, in so doing, transform our relationships. [pp. 183-184]
Check the partial list of picture books, series for young readers, and chapter books discussed in the book.
Check Amazon for more on this book I love.
