Literature and the Child Reader Carol Billman (bio) Cushla and Her Books, by Dorothy Butler. Boston: The Horn Book, 1980. The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children's Reading, ed. Margaret Meek, Aidan Warlow, and Criselda Barton. New York: Atheneum, 1978. On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination with Meaning, by Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Zelan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Reading is the subject of the hour in a variety of places these days. In the last decade or so, literary theorists and critics have flaunted the New Critical notion of the affective fallacy and attended more and more to the reader's part in giving meaning to a piece of literature. Psychologists interested in children's development—aesthetic as well as cognitive—are discussing the patterns and the value of both storytelling and the perception of stories by the young. Researchers, from those whose approach is psycholinguistic to those who observe the reading practices of a particular child in a particular social context, have worked to describe the skills necessary for reading and the processes involved. The appearance, in the last year alone, of a handful of practical guides for sharing literature with the young suggests that the current attention to reading and children is by no means restricted to the academic community. Thus it is an exciting time for those of us interested in thinking specifically about children's literary reading. The three books on reading reviewed here approach the subject from decidedly different directions. Together, they not only indicate the heterogeneity of contemporary reading inquiry but also spell out many of the important considerations for critics of children's literature now ready to pursue the subject that Robert Louis Stevenson explored in his own way nearly a century ago—how children play in the land of storybooks. The story behind Dorothy Butler's Cushla and Her Books, originally presented by the author in 1975 as her dissertation for the Diploma of Education at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, is by this [End Page 192] time rather well-known. Butler's granddaughter, Cushla Yeoman, was a baby born with an array with physical problems, the most serious of which were a perforated heart and a deformed kidney. Later, others emerged: Cushla had little control of her arms, and she could not focus properly. Mental retardation was presumed by some of her doctors. When she was four months old, Cushla's anxious parents, in the face of these distressing facts and still more unknowns about their daughter, began to read and show her books because they were determined "to keep her in touch" with the world and to keep themselves in touch with her. Butler recounts the friendship that evolved between Cushla and her books from that time until the age of 3 years 9 months, documenting the little girl's concomitant physical and cognitive and language development, in addition to her amazing personal and social growth. In literary acumen Cushla soon exceeded her peers, though at thirty-five weeks her growth in other areas was greatly retarded. Early on, Cushla responded to and incorporated into her own speech scraps of poetry and stories read to her, and by the age of approximately one year she had already demonstrated an unusual perceptual interest in symbols on the page, both printed words and shapes in pictures. To corroborate this record of achievement, Butler provides narrative accounts of Cushla's specific responses to a number of her favorite books, from Edward Lear to Lois Lenski, Brian Wildsmith, and Paul Galdone. But it should be pointed out that Butler's (and Cushla's parents') emphasis is not on literary development per se, but rather on the child's gradual acculturation, which was accomplished almost exclusively through books, the "friends who went with her into the dark and lonely places where others could not follow." Indeed, Cushla and Her Books is as much hortatory literature, told "in the hope of recruiting more human links between books and the handicapped children of the world," as it is a descriptive and analytic study for professionals. (In a final chapter Butler does, however, discuss Cushla's maturation in the light of...