William Flesch reviews the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature today for the Boston Globe. (Registration may be required. Unfortunately registration at the Boston Globe doesn't always work for me. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.)

Flesch's review is more complete than was Cashdan's for the Los Angeles Times a few weeks back. It is so complete in fact, that he has tipped the scale for me and I will purchase the volume.

Flesch includes in his review several of his own ideas about the attractions of reading children literature as an adult. He writes, for example, "What can make children's literature great is that it makes us think more consciously about what it was once like to respond as a child to literature, and what it must be like now for the child-reader implied by the book. For the adult reader, this child becomes another character we imagine and respond to and feel for, even or especially when the child isn't feeling what we are. Unlike so many characters we have later learned are fictional-Santa Claus, Cinderella, even, alas, Christopher Robin-we know the child-reader is real, at least for now."