The Brightening Glance

I really should have enjoyed this book. Imagination and its role in child development has always fascinated me. I wrote a paper and delivered a speech in a symposium my college held on imagination. Quickly, though, disappointment settled in.

The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood, by Ellen Handler Spitz, explores the role imagination plays as children develop. Spitz navigates this through a collection of short stories, personal thoughts, and a variety of art forms. They are loosely organized into several different categories. While each chapter is organized, there is very little running narrative or overall cohesion.

Spitz writes like a professor: scholarly, verbose, and with rich vocabulary. The book winds up reading like a 230-page research paper - without much research or with any sound conclusions. Yes, this book contains interesting insight, compelling stories, and solid writing. However, the final work is just a step or two away from being complete garbage.

Why? I'll try to be brief. The main issue I had while reading was trying to figure out who the intended audience was, and what her point was in writing this book given that audience. Let's look at the options:

Audience 1: Scholars in the field of education or child development. After all, the writing is definitely college-level.
The Problem: While it reads like a research paper, there's not enough research in the book for it to be in such a category, and there are far too many personal recollections. There's some analysis of child behavior and thinking, but too much of it comes from her personal experience, and there's really not a true thesis to the book, unless it's something utterly simplistic, like "imagination is an important element of child development"

Audience 2: The general reader. Spitz mentions several times how important it is for people to bring their childhood imagination back to life.
The Problem: It's written at a pretty high level and assumes decent background knowledge of child development. Its writing style would dissuade many casual readers as well.

Audience 3: Parents. Spitz offers a lot of advice to parents though the book.
The Problem: Most parents I know have little spare time to read, and those that do rarely have the time and energy to put into such a slow read. The parents that would read a book like this already know the mostly common-sense observations and tips Spitz writes about. The parents that might need the advice in this book are not going to be reading this book, I can guarantee you that. Why write a book that is inaccessible to the majority of your audience?

Additionally, Spitz comes off as a privileged elitist. One of her suggestions is that children get regular access to professional art performances (art museums, concerts, theater, etc), and really should be in the front rows to get the full experience. That stuff is EXPENSIVE. Sure, I'm good at finding free/discounted stuff, but not regularly enough to suit Spitz's standards. That's just one example of many where it's assumed that people are of equal privilege as her. It gets frustrating after a while.

Another annoying thing is that she spends about 1/3 of the book talking about her childhood experiences or the wonderful things she does for her daughter. Guess what? I don't really care to read every little detail about your childhood experiences. I didn't get this from the memoir/biography section of the library. Finally, her scholarly style saps a lot of interest from the short stories she shares, which gets old fast.

Okay, I wasn't brief. Negative reviews are always easier to write than positive reviews. In summation, this book has a small audience at best, very little purpose, and no strong points to make. Disappointing.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

33 books, 130 days...at this rate I'll read 92 books