The Magic of Children's Literature: Review of Our Granny

Every child has that one book they force their parents to read to them over and over and over again. For me, that book was Our Granny by Margaret Wilde. I lived with my grandmother for most of my life and since my mother worked two jobs, she wasn’t home most nights. It was my Granny that tucked me in and read me the majority of my bedtime stories. Our Granny is a book that celebrates all types of grandmothers: big and small, loud and quiet, rich and poor, and every kind in between.

The pages list various attributes that a Granny might have. She might have “thin legs,” “bristly chins,” “crinkly eyes,” or “big soft laps.” These characteristics were always accompanied by pastel-colored illustrations of a Granny examining herself in the mirror or swimming or doing yoga. One image I always paused on was a Granny with a short, wispy mane using a tweezer to pluck the hair off her chin. It was a silly image that combined her quirkiness with the care and pride she took in her appearance. After each page describing other grandmas, the narrator, a young girl, jumps in and clarifies what her Granny is like. 

It was during those pages I was convinced the book was written for me. It was impossible not to notice that the narrator and her grandmother looked almost identical to me and my Granny. The details about us were uncanny; in one picture, the narrator’s grandmother was dressed in a polka dot bathing suit similar to one that my grandmother always wore at the beach. The girl had blond hair and blue eyes in pigtails or braids. When reading the story to me my Granny would point at her hair and say, “I wish you let me braid your hair that way,” in an attempt to control my hair, which was almost always a knotted mess. I loved going through my day and comparing it with the girl and her grandmother, as if to calculate exactly how alike we and the fictional pair were.

While stuck in the house during the height of the pandemic, I decided to re-organize my bookshelf, which had become an amalgamation of all the books I accumulated in my first 20 years of life. When I came upon Our Granny, I looked it up online to see if it was one of those customized children’s books—it was not. Our Granny is just a case of when books become greater than words on a page and transform into something almost spiritual. 

After losing my grandmother a year ago, the book became an important reminder of my childhood and our relationship. An intimate connection is made between the reader and listener of a children’s book, and our nighttime rituals solidified our relationship at an early age. I lived with my grandmother my entire life and as a teacher, she was keen on instilling a love of reading in me. It was books like Our Granny that taught me the magic of reading and a story’s ability to extend beyond itself and into the hearts of readers. 

I think everyone should go back and look at those books they obsessed over as a child. It’s a reflection of growth, where we’ve come from, and who was there to hold our hand all along the way. There’s a therapeutic feeling in caressing the worn pages of a well-loved book, in reading for the simplicity of enjoying a story and nothing more. It can also be a means for catharsis, in coming to terms with growing up. 

I still pull Our Granny off its shelf on days when I want to bask in the nostalgia of my childhood, where my weekends were spent with her— the two of us going to the zoo, or the beach, or just relaxing in our yard, feeling the summer breeze until the day darkened and drifted me off to bed and off to another bedtime story.

October 2021