ABSTRACT
This chapter explores emotional responses and attachments to challenging picturebooks drawing upon a reader response study done with La madre y la muerte, a book that presents a macabre and unsettling story about death. The Argentinian author Alberto Laiseca turns Hans Christian Andersen’s “Story of a Mother” into an even darker parable about a mother who sacrifices herself to bring back her dead child. In this chapter, we consider questions about the boundaries of age appropriateness and emotional complexity. The chapter considers adult resistance to such books, contrasting it with children’s openness to confronting difficult emotions, thus revealing tensions in emotional education.
