Reading Sad Books Is Good for Your Kids

Last summer, my wife and I took our kids to Reader’s World, a wonderful bookstore in Holland, Mich. It was one of the last stops on our Lake Michigan vacation. I watched my son and daughter head straight to the children’s section, where they began pulling down options and building small sand castles of books.

Eventually Henry, our oldest, brought over a paperback I hadn’t heard of, a novel much thicker than the chapter books he usually read. He liked the cover — a lone robot on a rocky island with mountains and pine trees in the background — and asked if he could get it. Sure, I said.

Henry started his new book at the store and basically never stopped, devouring it on our drive home and our first day back, when he woke up early and resumed reading while still wrapped in his forest animal sheets. He woke up early the second morning, too, and I can still picture him slipping into our room to announce he’d finished it, “all 300 pages.” But I could tell something was wrong.

When I asked him if he liked the ending, Henry dissolved into tears. He climbed into our bed and onto my chest, his small body shaking, his crying so intense he couldn’t speak. Finally, he managed a single sentence: “Dad, why did ‘The Wild Robot’ have to be sad?”

Peter Brown’s middle grade trilogy, which concludes this month with “The Wild Robot Protects,” has meant so much to so many readers. To my son, Brown’s books were the first he discovered on his own; the first that swept him up in a lengthy, can’t-put-it-down narrative; the first to wallop him with the mix of tragedy and joy that define great art and also real life.

I didn’t grasp all this on that tearful morning — I just tried to hug Henry and listen. Once he was feeling better, though, I picked up “The Wild Robot” myself. I could see why he loved it.