The Second Reading and Beyond: Exploring Re-Readability in Children’s Novels

Noah Weisz reflects on the ‘literary magic’ of re-readability with particular focus on Frances Hardinge’s ‘Cuckoo Song’.

Abstract

Writers for young people often know firsthand that when children love a novel, they may read it over and over, sometimes across many years. This reality, however, rarely influences conversations on craft. Aiming to write books children will love means aiming to write books that will remain rewarding or even deepen with every reread – books that feel practically inexhaustible. What craft features facilitate this? Can we reverse engineer this particular literary magic? This article investigates these questions via an analysis of Frances Hardinge’s novel Cuckoo Song (2014). Drawing on ideas about rereading proposed by scholars and authors such as Alison Waller, Colette Drouillard, Joan Aiken, K.M. Weiland, and Donald Fry, this paper looks at how Hardinge constructs a beautifully complex web of a novel that cannot be fully apprehended in a single reading. Based on this analysis, the article then distills some techniques for building this sense of inexhaustibility into children’s fiction, such as the deliberate inclusion of material that will only be noticed, gain meaning, or become emotionally impactful on a second or even later reading; the artful weaving of connections across the text; the creation of complex secondary characters; and the central placement of human paradox or unresolvable mystery.