Realizing that the color red is the center of our defensive catalog is profound. We see much of the same in other current best sellers, and in the young-reader books favored by many schools as the new academic year gets underway. The language is colloquial to an extreme. In Dragons Like Tacos (483 weeks on the Times list), a book that was also read at my daughter’s school, the narrator states, “Hey dragon, why do you guys like tacos so much?” In On the First Day of Kindergarten (two weeks on the list), we hear, “On the first day of kindergarten, I thought it was so cool riding the school bus to my school!” In The Smart Cookie (29 weeks on the list), which often reads like a therapist’s version of a child’s inner monologue, the titular cookie states, “I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing my ideas. I didn’t feel like a smart cookie.”

A few of these titles attempt a poeticism that falls short. “You did this job in your very own way. We needed a tough little truck today,” we read in Time for School, Little Blue Truck (44 weeks on the list). In the Magical Yet (7 weeks on the list), a story about a child attempting to learn a variety of new skills like bike riding (its cadences apparently and notably adopted from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go), we hear, “And now you won’t ride. No way. Not never. No riding for you, you’ll walk … forever.” It had seemed that at the end of those ellipses, we might encounter something more … complex. But alas, we don’t.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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