Frankenstein: A BabyLit Anatomy Primer by Jennifer Adams and Art by Alison Oliver
I’ve always been fond of baby books that tackle adult topics. I used to give a baby book about calculus to my friends when they started having babies. Part of it was tongue in cheek; part of it was the belief that if you introduced concepts like complex mathematics at an early age, there would be less fear about the topic later in life.
So when I started finding BabyLit Classic books, I was naturally intrigued. But what really sold me on the franchise was Frankenstein, the simple text by Jennifer Adams, and Art by Alison Oliver. Instead of the book trying to summarize the plot of Frankenstein in a few pages, it has a tongue in cheek component. It’s a book to teach children about parts of the body using Frankenstein’s Monster. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: Hounds of the Baskervilles teaches different sounds of doors creaking, lightning crashing, and more.
Adams explained the idea to PW: “[I]t’s important to note that these books are not retellings. A retelling of Anna Karenina for a 3-year-old would be ridiculous! [In a shrewd paring-down, BabyLit’s tie-in to Tolstoy’s 1877 masterpiece is Anna Karenina: A Fashion Primer.] The series features primers that teach age-appropriate concepts for babies, but use the characters, settings, and storylines of classic novels to do so. When the books are working at their best, they are functioning on two levels — for the child and also for the adult.”
I think finding baby books of any sort that work on both levels is important. My child learns important words and is exposed to classic literature at a very basic level…and I get to enjoy reading the story. I love seeing how the authors have reimagined each classic book. Some introduce various characters from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven.
