Listening and Collaborating: Calling Home (Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada ) (Book Review‪)‬

The ten essays in Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada are the product of a three-year, Winnipeg-based collaborative project, referred to by the twelve contributors as "the Childplaces project" or "the Home project," which involved annual meetings to discuss "ways in which discourses of home function in Canadian children's literature" (xiii). Vigorous discussions, on a less formal basis, obviously took place throughout the research and writing period, enabling, to use editor Mavis Reimer's words, "exchange of views and resources, reworking of drafts, and testing and challenging of ideas" (x). The resulting essays "at once bristle with cross-talk and cohere in their difference" (226), concludes Neil Besner, one of the assigned "metacritics" of the project, who describes the work as "a group of essays that at once advance a particular argument and speak across that argument to each other" (230). The writers' transparent revelations of the evolution of their thoughts and ideas as they appear in the final work reveal not only the development of individual responses to the concept of home, but also the significant impact of the ongoing discussion on those responses. Highly successful and stimulating in its readings of Canadian children's literature, the edited collection is also a model of interactive and co-operative scholarship. I read Home Words with increasing excitement and anticipation as the discussion successfully situated primary texts within current discourses of postcolonial and postmodern thought. Although the group doubts the success of its attempts to attract a broader readership than the regular academic audience, the intellectually rigorous essays are unusually accessible and engaging. As part of Wilfrid Laurier University Press's multidisciplinary series, Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada, and through its connections with the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg, where Mavis Reimer is the Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood, the project and collection are grounded in a recognizable and invigorating interdisciplinary approach. This work is the result and the beginning of a long-awaited integration and inclusion of Canadian children's literature within the more general fields of Canadian literature and literary theory and criticism. I do not think that I am overestimating the importance of this book when I claim that it will stand as the work that finally brought Canadian children's literature into the mainstream literary discussion, instigating and inspiring further work in response to its open invitation to continue the fertile discussion that has only just begun. In her 2008 article, "Harry Potter and the Novice's Confession," Linda Hutcheon confesses with regret that she "could have studied (and taught) all the things I did study (and teach) in my entire career using the vast and rich corpus of children's literature" (170). She identifies in children's literature the presence of postmodern elements: parody, metafiction, the "mixing of the visual and verbal," and the rewriting of subversive narratives (171). Before going on to discuss her topic of adaptation, Hutcheon comments on other areas enriched by studying children's literature, specifically, "postcoloniality and multiculturalism," and writes that Home Words suggests that "children's literature in Canada (as elsewhere) confronts head-on the issues of nationhood, race, ethnicity, and belonging" (171). The fact that Linda Hutcheon is publishing in The Lion and the Unicorn and talked about Canadian children's literature in her keynote speech at the University of Ottawa's 2008 symposium, "Re: Reading the Postmodern," are promising signs that the impossible, stubborn, and unproductive separation of literature for adults and literature for children in Canada is finally breaking down. (1) Much of the credit for this welcome and overdue development goes to the writers who