Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children
Quality
Essay Collection
Nonfiction
Contemplative
ProvocativeThe review
Reviewers largely describe this as a short, warm, and quotable case for taking children's books seriously as art, built from a handful of personal essays rather than academic argument. The tone is conversational and often funny, and critics single out the author's voice — plainspoken, generous toward the craft, unafraid of a well-turned aphorism — as the book's biggest asset; several note it reads in a single sitting and rewards being read aloud in places.
The same conviction that makes the book propulsive is also its most-flagged weakness. More than one reviewer calls it closer to a sermon than a study: it argues a fixed position with confidence rather than surveying the field, and readers not already sympathetic to that position may feel argued at rather than persuaded. A widely discussed passage in which the author estimates a large share of children's literature is mediocre landed, for a notable slice of readers and commentators, as condescending rather than the self-deprecating joke it was intended as — triggering public pushback the author has since publicly addressed. Critics are split on how much that moment should color the rest of the book: some treat it as a minor stumble in an otherwise big-hearted argument, others as symptomatic of a broader didacticism running through the whole project.
Where consensus holds is on the book's underlying thesis — that children's stories deserve to be judged as literature and written for the child rather than the hovering adult — and on its craft: the prose is polished, the structure light and essayistic, and the affection for the form evident throughout, even among reviewers who pushed back hardest on individual claims.
Who it's for
Parents, teachers, librarians, and children's-book creators who want a fast, opinionated, well-written case for taking picture books and kids' literature seriously as art — readers already inclined to love the form who want that love articulated.
Who it's not for
Readers wanting a scholarly or comprehensive survey of children's literature rather than a personal manifesto, and anyone likely to bristle at a confident, opinionated authorial voice making sweeping claims about quality in the field.
Birds of a feather...
- TVBluey (2018)
Bluey is the living, produced version of Barnett's thesis: it treats play and story as children's primary language, casts the parent as a co-conspirator in imagination rather than an authority handing down lessons, and earns its emotional weight through specificity and wit instead of moralizing or saccharine uplift. Anyone moved by Barnett's argument for story-over-didacticism has probably already felt it working on them in this show.
92% - BookIs This a Cry for Help? (2026)
This novel stages, as literal plot, the exact fight Barnett names as the organizing battle of children's publishing: adults who want to control what kids read versus the belief that stories deserve to exist on their own terms. Its library-censorship thread turns Barnett's polemic into dramatized conflict, right down to the discomfort of being institutionally positioned as an arbiter of what's appropriate.
88% - BookOn Morrison (2026)
Both books are short, essayistic works of practitioner-criticism written from a position of institutional authority, arguing that a genre has been read too narrowly (moral seriousness over formal artistry, in Serpell's case) and using close attention to specific texts to make that case rather than surveying a field. Both also model the tension of criticizing-from-love, willing to flag where the object of their affection falls short.
74% - BookWhistler (2026)
Whistler's embedded fable, told by an adult to a child in crisis, dramatizes exactly what Barnett argues in essay form: that story isn't decoration or lesson-delivery but a genuine survival mechanism, and that the act of telling a child a story is serious, adult work worth taking seriously as craft.
70% - BookSeasons of Glass and Iron: Stories (2026)
El-Mohtar works in the same territory Barnett champions, taking children's-story material (fairy tale) and insisting it deserves serious literary and intellectual treatment, and both books share a formal playfulness that performs its own argument about story's power rather than just asserting it.
66% - BookArt Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health (2026)
Like Art Cure, this is advocacy nonfiction built from personal narrative and professional experience toward an institutional argument -- here that an art form (picture books) deserves more critical and funding respect than it currently gets, there that the arts deserve health-infrastructure funding. Both use a persuasive, first-person-inflected case for taking an undervalued art form seriously, though this one leans polemical essay rather than epidemiological evidence review.
58%