Art & Creativity Quote by Helen Dunmore

Dunmore’s line is a quiet rebuke to the adult fantasy that taste can be installed like software. Children, she insists, are the last honest critics: they won’t perform “being well-read” to please a parent, teacher, or prize committee. The verb “pretend” does a lot of work here. It hints at the social theater around books - gold stickers, level charts, worthy syllabi - and then punctures it. Adults may read out of duty or status; kids read (or don’t) with a simpler brutality. If the book doesn’t move, surprise, amuse, or absorb them, the transaction collapses.

The subtext is also an argument about power. “Told that these books are good” evokes authority speaking in a moral register, as if “good” were a stable property rather than a lived experience. Dunmore, a poet steeped in the sensory and the precise, shifts the criterion from approval to pleasure: “delight.” Not entertainment in the cheap sense, but the spark of wanting to turn the page because something in the language, character, or world feels newly alive. Delight is a bodily reaction; you can’t mandate it.

In context, this lands as both a defense of imaginative writing for young readers and a critique of the way institutions sanitize reading into self-improvement. Dunmore isn’t anti-canon; she’s anti-coercion. Her intent is to remind gatekeepers that the fastest way to kill a reader is to treat books as medicine. The irony is that delight is often the only route to the “good” adults claim to want: attention, empathy, and a lifelong relationship with words.