Judging a Book by Its Cover: A 6-year-old Guesses What Classic Novels Are All About

Posted by sunnychanel on July 12th, 2012 

What is No Exit About?

“Momma, what’s this book about?” That is a question that I hear every time we go to our local bookstore as my very curious six-year-old daughter picks up eye-catching books from various sections from fiction to biographies to psychology. My family spends a fair amount time in bookstores, so this is a query I’ve become accustomed to hearing and one I try my darndest to answer (but really, how does one explain James Joyce’s Ulysses to a six-year-old?).
Recently, I’ve been curious to see what she thought the books were about. She doesn’t yet know — from experience or exposure — what the narrative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit is about, what happens in the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or that George Orwell’s Animal Farm is not a book for children.
What happens when this recent kindergarten graduate judges a book by its cover? Here are the results:
(above No Exit: “It’s about someone who is in jail and you know there are no exits in a jail.”)

• The Great Gatsby

  "I think it's a book about a haunted theme park and it stars a magical magic guy and he's good and evil and he's trying to get rid of the ghosts. And I think at the end, since it's haunted by a ghost, he tried to make the park go on fire and it did. "
  /strollerderby/2012/07/12/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-a-6-year-old-guesses-what-classic-novels-are-all-about/#the-great-gatsby
• 
  To Kill a Mockingbird

  "It's about a guy that tried to kill a mockingbird but he couldn't because the bird was magical. And the bird lives

  
  

  Well worth a visit to this site to read the rest. 

  Thanks to IIML for bringing this to my attention.