INSERT RELEVANT SMITHS LYRIC HERE: Over the weekend I re-read Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Power of Three. This is a truly terrific kids’ fantasy book–one of Jones’s best, and that’s saying a lot. (I think my other picks would be, in about this order, Fire and Hemlock; Dogsbody; Cart and Cwidder; Witch Week; The Time of the Ghost; The Ogre Downstairs; Witch’s Business (aka Own Back Ltd., I think); Charmed Life. Wow, that’s a lot.) As usual, Jones carves out distinctive characters with a few quick strokes. As usual, she makes you feel as if you’ve lived in the novel’s family or community all your life–she’s especially adept at family relationships and rivalries. But what really struck me about her books, and about the best children’s literature generally, is that she understands the miseries and terrors of childhood. She knows they’re real–they’re not dress-up versions of adult miseries, a My First Depression playset. She knows that children can experience real self-hatred, and can be drawn into real nihilism. (This is a point I make in my Crisis article–still not online, doh–on why kids should read non-Christian and even anti-Christian fantasy.) She remembers what it was really like. One reason children can be genuinely miserable is simply that children are a lot like adults. Although their brains aren’t as fully developed as adult brains, they are able to reason, to intuit, and to see through falsehoods; they’re also able to lie (including lying to themselves), hate, and knowingly do evil. But children are at a special disadvantage when it comes to misery: They have almost no past tense, and only the haziest and most unrealistic future tense, so they have very few resources to draw on when misery hits. They have few, if any, memories of overcoming tragedy or self-loathing, and they have a hard time realistically imagining such overcoming.