Towards Happily Ever After
Reading children’s books as adults reminds us that, however comforting the idea of returning to our past, we must keep moving forward.
Review by Sara Holston
There’s a pervasive idea in the world these days that we do (or maybe that we should) “grow out” of children’s literature at some point. But I often find that reading children’s books results in a particular kind of catharsis I rarely encounter in works for adults.
To me, this comes down to one major factor: children’s books are often “coming of age” stories, and I think that even as grown-ups, we still need those more than we realize. Kids need these kinds of narratives because they’ve never come of age before—reading these tales can help them navigate the experience. But we too easily forget that it’s not a one-and-done sort of deal. There may be particular birthdays or other experiential rites of passage upon which we are societally deemed to have matured into adults, but we are nevertheless always sort of coming of age—growing more fully into ourselves and settling into a sense of place and purpose in the world around us. It can be helpful, in those times of transition, to be reminded that we’ve done it before and come out the better for it.
So it’s easy to relate to the protagonists of children’s books, who are usually thrust into situations where their world is changing faster than they ever imagined. We, too, often find ourselves in situations where we must take big risks to adapt, leaving behind people and places that are comfortable and familiar. As we watch these characters fight through seemingly insurmountable obstacles, we can think back on the ones we’ve overcome and remember that we know how to do this—or at least, we know that change doesn’t have to be the end of the world.
Unsurprisingly, Petra wishes she could go back to the life, home, and family that is behind her.
In The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera, last year’s Newbery Medal Winner (the 100th!), the protagonist, Petra, takes transition to the extreme. With Halley’s Comet returning on a collision course with Earth, she and her family must leave behind their home planet. They will spend hundreds of years in cryo-sleep on a spaceship before waking up on some distant world, where they will hopefully establish a new home for humanity. But when a coup among those piloting the ship and caring for the sleeping passengers upsets these plans, Petra instead awakens to a dystopian reality.
The descendants of the ship’s pilots and caretakers have genetically altered themselves beyond recognition in an attempt to eliminate all differences and create a utopian Collective. Petra is one of a handful of survivors—all children—from among the sleeping passengers, and she is the only one for whom the Collective’s cognitive “reprogramming” has failed to erase all sense of identity or memory of home. Her parents, Petra discovers, also failed to be reprogrammed, and when the Collective found out, they were purged into the emptiness of space. Now, Petra is alone, surrounded by enemies, and carrying the responsibility of saving the other remaining children and, hopefully, the human race.
Unsurprisingly, Petra wishes she could go back to the life, home, and family that is behind her. The future is uncertain, but one thing she does know is that every person she has ever loved—ever even known—is gone. The very planet she grew up on is gone. The one on which she now finds herself is palpably and radically different, with an eternal twilight of purple skies and devastating windstorms cycling like the tides. She laments: “What do I have to gain by going forward? Everything I love is behind me.”
Though I have never experienced a transition of quite that magnitude (I still live on Earth, for example), I resonated with Petra’s feeling that it would be preferable to go backwards. In the past few months, I left my home and community in San Francisco to start graduate school on the other side of the country. I attempted to assuage some of the heartbreak by imagining returning someday to live in the same building, or at least the same neighborhood. It was comforting to think I could pick right back up with my life as if the interlude for grad school were just a dream.
But even so, I knew it was a very child-like idea—like the time I made my parents promise we could buy back our house someday when we moved for the first time (surprisingly, we never did). Even on the same planet, there is no going back; we can only go forward. While I still hope to return to San Francisco, I know it will be different when I do. I will have changed, and the city and my communities will have, also. I won’t be returning to the exact same life I was living last year.
When it comes down to it, most of us don’t actually want to stay in the same place and state of mind forever.
The truth is, I wouldn’t be living that life anyway, even if I hadn’t moved. Things change. But that’s okay, because there’s one other key feature of children’s books: they usually have happy endings. It’s not just necessary or inevitable that we keep moving forward—it’s good. When it comes down to it, most of us don’t actually want to stay in the same place and state of mind forever. The future we build on the other side of each transition may not be perfect, but it’s worth it.
Maybe this is another reason Petra’s story resonated with me as an adult. The change in Petra’s world happened suddenly and (mostly) without her knowledge—she went to sleep expecting to wake up to a certain reality and found herself instead in a very different (and much scarier) one. Like Petra, most children have very little control over what happens to them. Adults, on the other hand, usually choose to make changes—including leaving behind good things in search of other good things.
The choice to leave my home and community to pursue a graduate degree across the country was entirely mine, which means it comes with some doubts. Lately, when those thoughts come up, I find myself, like Petra, falling back on her grandmother’s words of wisdom: “If you don’t take a risk, you cannot cross the ocean.” They come from one of Petra’s grandmother’s cuentos—this one is a story about a young woman who surmounts a series of obstacles to rescue her love and then flee their enemies, trusting a flying horse to carry them safely across a vast sea. For Petra and her grandmother—and now for me—this is a reminder that happy endings don’t often fall into our laps; we have to go in search of them, and this may require us to take big risks. Stories like The Last Cuentista can help all of us—children and adults alike—to take that first step in a new place, and the next one, and the next one, remembering that we’ve done this before, and we can do it again.
Sara Holston is a student at HLS, and the current Managing Editor of Fare Forward.
The Last Cuentista was published by Levine Querido on October 12, 2021. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
