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Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.
The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.
There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.
I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?
The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.
Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.
Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?
The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.
There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.
I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?
The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.
Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.
Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?
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Maybe in part because when you debunk things no one above the age of 12 believes in anyway, you don't get any pushback?
Something I always found unappealing about many books of this type is how terribly safe they are. The author isn't pushing any boundaries, they're just waving the idea of boundary-pushing around and then retreating safely back into the mundane world. When I was a kid I found books like, say, A Wrinkle In Time much more engaging because they actually challenged me to imagine weird and wonderful things outside my own experience. It takes courage to write a book like that, because you're asking people to take the fantasy seriously, at least for the duration of the book, and you're taking the risk that they'll find it too silly or unbelievable. Whereas if you write a book with the message "There is actually no magic" you're not risking anything at all because everyone already knows and agrees with that.
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