SOURCE: Review of Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter, by Alison Lurie. Publisher's Weekly 249, no. 48 (2 December 2002): 45.

In the following review, the critic offers praise for Lurie's observations regarding children's literature in Boys and Girls Forever.

A perceptive critic, Lurie (Don't Tell the Grown-Ups) has long been a close observer of children's literature. This welcome volume [Boys and Girls Forever] collects a number of her essays on the subject, most of which appeared in other versions in the New York Review of Books. As she wittily deconstructs the lives and works of authors as varied as Louisa May Alcott (“she was the daughter of what would now be described as vegetarian hippie intellectuals, with fringe religious and social beliefs, and spent nearly a year of her childhood in an unsuccessful commune”), Hans Christian Andersen, J. K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss, a common theme emerges...