The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (review)

Book Reviews Finally, Cadden’s own narrative voice offers abundant humor. He is simply a very funny man, as when he notes, with a droll Hobbesian allusion, that a reader might identify with a character as being short, “but find nothing else in that character to connect to, perhaps because the character is nasty and brutish as well. . . .” Cadden welcomes disagreement with his readings of particular characters (I myself think he is somewhat unfair to Junie B. and Ramona), but hopes that readers will “find the framework, the idea of rhetorical modulation, useful.” At Arm’s Length presents its central device of the dial of character modulation so persuasively and enjoyably that readers will find their fingers twitching to spin it themselves into a host of fruitful discussions of how we understand character in children’s and young adult literature.