Art & Creativity Quote by Mark Haddon

Haddon’s line flatters kids with one hand and needles the adults who market “children’s literature” with the other. The opening claim - children don’t bother with categories - is a quiet rebuke to the industry habit of treating youth as a niche audience with niche standards. For a child, the experience is immediate: does the story grip me, scare me, delight me, make me want one more page? That blunt binary - good or bad - has a moral bite. It implies that grown-ups often hide behind labels (“age-appropriate,” “educational,” “for reluctant readers”) as if they can substitute for craft.

Then comes the twist: some books kids love are “very, very bad indeed.” The repetition isn’t academic; it’s comic and slightly horrified, like a parent overhearing a child quote a mindless TV catchphrase for the hundredth time. Haddon isn’t really dunking on children’s taste so much as exposing how taste is formed. Children are fierce consumers, but they’re also vulnerable to sugar-rush storytelling: formula, cheap thrills, brand familiarity, the narrative equivalent of neon packaging.

The subtext is that adults have two equally lazy temptations: to romanticize children as pure judges of art, or to dismiss them as undiscerning. Haddon rejects both. Kids are honest readers, not enlightened ones. That honesty is exactly why the cultural gatekeeping matters: if children won’t make the distinction for us, the least we can do is stop handing them “bad indeed” and calling it a genre.