It's a Dark World

I just finished reading The Secret of Nightingale Wood by Lucy Strange, and I enjoyed it. Or maybe enjoyed is the wrong word since I read most of it with tears in my eyes.

The book had a good rating on Amazon, but a number of reviewers said it was too dark for the 8-12 age group where the publisher had placed it.

I disagree.

Obviously, every parent should monitor his or her child’s reading material and understand what that individual child can handle. But this is a dark world, and children of all ages come across death and mental illness and ruthless people. We can’t protect our children from the dark side of life, but we should prepare them as best we can. And fiction is one means of doing that. Obviously, some novels handle these matters better than others, but The Secret of Nightingale Wood treats the issues sensitively. I certainly would not have objected to my daughter reading it when she was eight years old.

The book is writen by a British author and is set in England just after World War I. As mentioned by one reviewer, it would have benefited from an author’s note putting it in historical perspective. Still, middle-grade readers should be able to follow the story and separate the worthy characters from the immoral ones.

I am reminded of Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, which won the Newberry Metal but was banned from some school libraries because it deals with death (and for some mild language that every child is familiar with). In my opinion, it is one of the best books on death ever written for children.

The Secret of Nightingale Wood isn’t quite a Bridge to Terabithia, and it is far from perfect, primarily because there are too many coincidences for my liking. Fortunately, most have some advance set-up, and the one that didn’t became less of a concern on second glance. I won’t spoil the plot, but when I thought about that seemingly important coincidence (which comes almost at the end of the book), I realized that it wasn’t even necessary to the story, which resolved nicely without it.

But as to not letting your children read it because it deals with dark subjects? That’s not a valid reason. You can’t protect them from life, but you can try to prepare them for it.

So add The Secret of Nightingale Wood to your middle-grade child’s library.