Children's Choice: Charlotte's Web

Charlotte's Web

by E.B. White

Published by HarperCollins

No list of books recommended for children would be credible without Charlotte's Web, the enduringly popular novel by E.B. White (of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style"), first published in 1952 and still a bestseller. Though it isn't a favourite of mine (I was never quite able to "suspend disbelief"), I am resoundingly outvoted by children, parents, reviewers and critics generally; so in it goes. The story is about a spider called Charlotte who saves a piglet from the butcher by weaving words in her web. It says something about the strength of the writing that the death of the spider at the end seems tragic. Yet I could not quite dispel a doubt, a sense of the story being contrived. Children aged about ten upwards will make up their own minds. HarperCollins paperback, US$4.50. Read more about Charlotte's Web on Amazon

M.A., August 2, 1997