Re-Reading “Charlotte’s Web” as an Adult

"Charlotte's Web" (1952) Book Review

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read Charlotte’s Web, but I do remember that the ending made me cry. Perusing through a used book store the other day, I came across a beat up version of the book and wondered- will it make me cry as an adult? 

I’m a little more emotionally resilient than I was back in those days (Scooby Doo used to terrify me), but I decided to give the book a try. Coming in, the only thing I remembered about the book was that it was about a spider and a pig, and it had a sad ending. 

So, 71 years after its original publication- how does the book hold up? Is it enjoyable for modern readers? Suitable for modern children? Let’s discuss.

Who Will Enjoy This Book

I think that any young-ish child that likes to read will enjoy this book. And any adult that really loved Charlotte’s Web as a child will like it as well for the nostalgia factor. 

I probably wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone who has already hit puberty and who hadn’t read the book or watched one of its adaptations before they hit puberty. 

The story is written in the simplest style imaginable- think Hemingway’s prose on reverse-steroids simple. I imagine that most children with a full grasp of the alphabet and a decent understanding of grammar will be able to read this book with minimal help. 

I think that children today will enjoy the book just as much as children of the past did. And I think that this book has one big advantage over books of today. This will be a spoiler for the book, so stop reading the review now if you don’t want to know what happens in the story. 

The Book is not Afraid of Death

In Modern Western society, we try to “protect” children from any and all negative emotions. This book has no such delusions. 

The circle of life is very present in this book. The book discusses death in a simple, realistic, yet still gentle, way. The main character, the pig Wilbur, is told straight-up that he is going to be killed and turned into bacon. In fact, the story begins with a little girl, Fern, saving Wilbur’s life from her father’s ax. 

I grew up in a farm town and spent some time on farms. And you know what? 

You can’t hide from death on a farm. 

Maybe in the city or in the suburbs you can hide things from children better (provided they aren’t in a violent section of a city), but on the farm, animals die. My mom was always trying to save animals from death when she grew up on her farm- and she always failed. Unlike in this story, she couldn’t save her favorite sheep or pigs from being sold off or killed for meat. 

Death is a part of life. I think we do children a disservice by hiding it from them. Those children then grow up to be adults who are afraid of death and don’t know how to process it in a healthy way (hello my generation). 

I think this book is a fantastic thing to read with young children if they have already experienced death, or to give them a reference point for when they inevitably experience it. 

I took a bunch of children’s literature courses in college, and one of the themes that often came up was the idea of Innocence. 

A few hundred years ago, literature introduced the idea of the Child with a capital C. Children used to be considered little adults. In the last few hundred years, society started viewing children as Children, special beings in a state of Innocence that must be protected for as long as possible. 

Children are special: they should be allowed to play all day; they shouldn’t have to work or help around the house too much; we should make them feel good all the time always; we should never ever let them experience anything remotely negative; we should give them everything they want; etc. 

Personally, I don’t know that these values we place upon Children are a net-positive for society. I think that protecting children from the negatives of life creates adults who aren’t comfortable dealing with the negative aspects of life. These adults, in turn, are unable to help their children process negativity. Then these children become adults who are even worse at dealing with negativity- and on and on and on again. 

Did I just put a little societal rant into a children’s book that took me a couple hours to read? Yerp. Moving on. 

My Rating for the Book (and some writerly notes) 

I give this book between a 5 and a 9 out of 10. 5 for adults who are uninterested in children’s literature and who never read this book as a kid. 6 or 7 for adults who did like this story as children. And an 8 or 9 for children that like to read. 

I think that this is a fantastic story for parents or teachers to read with children. 

On my personal scale, I put this book in the Liked, but won’t read again category. 

However, I would definitely read it again if I was reading it to a child. I have no idea if this book is still in the curriculum at schools for young children, but it certainly deserves to be. 

So ends the review. Below I’m going to post some critiques of the book from a writer’s perspective. Feel free to skip this if you aren’t interested in writing technique or story structure. 

Oh ya, I almost forgot about mentioning why I picked up the book in the first place. Did Charlotte’s Web make me cry as an adult? No, but I did feel some feelings during the emotional parts of the book. 

(I might have cried a bit if I wasn’t so annoyed by the writing of the story, which I’ll discuss below.)

Your friend at the end of the bar drinking cranberry juice with a straw, 

Josh

Editorial Critiques of the Book 

-The character of Fern, the little girl, is very underwritten. At the beginning of the story, she cries and fights to save Wilbur’s life. By the end of the story, Wilbur is an award-winning show pig- and Fern completely loses interest in him. 

It’s not usually odd for a child to lose interest in something, but this particular something is a pig that Fern bottle-fed from birth. And it is a pig that she considers her friend. And it’s a pig that she thinks can talk! You really think a child would lose interest in a talking pig over the course of the summer??? On that note…

-Do the animals actually talk? Is it just in Fern’s mind? 

I will say, it does seem like the animals actually talk to each other. They speak in scenes in which Fern isn’t present. I didn’t think anything of the animals talking until about halfway through the book, when Fern repeats the content of the animals’ conversations to her parents. 

As soon as she revealed that she knew about the conversations, I thought: HUH? WTF? Is it all in her head?

I know it’s just a simply written children’s story, but it’s a bit confusing in the scope of the story’s “world.” If Fern can understand the animals talking to each other, why does she never join their conversations? If Fern can understand them, why doesn’t she react when Wilbur finds out that he is going to be turned into bacon at the end of the year? If Fern can understand talking animals, why does she lose interest in them so quickly? And if the animals’ conversations are in Fern’s imagination, why do they have conversations when she isn’t around and after she has lost interest in the animals?

None of this is particularly important to the message of the story, or to a child’s enjoyment of the story, but it had my editorial senses tingling, so I felt like putting it out there on the internet. 

Your friend at the end of the bar ranting about the writing in a 71 year old children’s book,

Josh