Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Mahy

Children's fiction, Mahy reminds us, isn't a gated community of "cute" techniques you graduate out of. It's a workshop where certain tools get tested for power: wordplay that snaps the brain awake, and outsized events that turn fear into spectacle. Her phrasing is quietly mischievous. Those jokes and exaggerations don't merely reappear; they "haunt" the older stories, like friendly ghosts that refuse to be exorcised once the writer starts taking adolescence seriously.

The intent is partly craft talk and partly a defense of tonal complexity. Mahy is arguing that the so-called simpler register of writing for very young kids isn't a lesser art; it's foundational. Word jokes train an ear for rhythm and double meaning. Exaggerated events are not just slapstick, they're narrative engines: they externalize emotions kids can't yet name. When those devices resurface in books for older readers, they do different work. The laugh becomes a pressure valve, and the exaggeration becomes metaphor: a way to make the chaos of growing up visible without turning didactic.

The subtext also pushes back against an adult literary hierarchy that treats humor as disposable. Mahy suggests the opposite: comedy is sticky. It clings to the "complex stories" because it has structural value, not just entertainment value. Context matters here. Coming out of a late-20th-century children's literature scene that was increasingly willing to mingle fantasy, psychological realism, and linguistic play, Mahy positions continuity as her signature. The child reader changes; the writer's toolkit, wisely, doesn't pretend it has to.