My reading of Little Annie’s Ramble, managed to reinforce the epiphany I had while I was reading The Case against Peter Pan, two weeks ago; although not without a little extra experimentation on my part. While reading Little Annie’s Ramble on my iPad I happened to be doing it right next to my eleven year old niece (while she was also doing something on her iPad). After finishing and reflecting on how much this story happened to resonate with this idea that not all children’s literature is for children, which I had gotten from my reading the first couple sentences of The Case against Peter Pan, I decided to try something. I asked my niece if she would like to see what type of stuff College kids have to read and she said yes. I then showed her the entire text of Little Annie’s Ramble and she was (understandably) a bit taken aback with it. I then told her to try and read the first paragraph with me and, through a bit of egging on, she said she’d try. She struggled, but with my help she finished it. I then asked her what she thought about it and she said she didn’t understand any of it. I then read to her parts of the text out loud (mainly the parts describing the candy shop and toy store). I made sure to enunciate certain words like sugar, sweetly, cakes and doll and (after I finished each exert) when I asked her what I was describing she answered (although clearly uncertain in her facial expressions) “candy” and “toys”, respectively.

Although all I was really doing was killing time before Sons of Anarchy started, my experiment on my niece gave me a bit more understanding in the context of children. I knew for a fact that this text was not meant for children and I proved that by making her read the text to me out loud and asking her if she understood it (which she did not). At the same time though, when I read it to her (while making sure I enunciated certain words I knew she’d know) she managed to get a general idea of what I was talking about. Through this nonchalant experiment I’ve come to an interesting understanding in my abovementioned epiphany: even if specific stories about children are not meant for children there is still always something there for children, even if they themselves don’t know it is there.