How the Heather Looks:
A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Booksby Joan Bodger
McClelland & Stewart, 304 pp. $23.95
Originally published in 1965 and recently reprinted, Joan Bodger’s charming How the Heather Looks recounts the pilgrimage Bodger took with her family across Britain (from Cornwall to Nottingham to Scotland) in hopes of discovering the actual settings — both real and mythical — of their favorite British children’s books. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part guide to British children’s literature, How the Heather Looks should please Anglophiles and book lovers alike, especially those readers who spent much of their youth losing themselves in the tiny green Beatrix Potter books, following Rat and Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, or exploring the legend of King Arthur. If your knowledge of British children’s literature is not as wide and intense as Bodger’s (who never met an exclamation mark she didn’t like), the book can sometimes feel like an exclusionary drag. Still, the author’s enthusiastic voice and storytelling ability make reading this book seem almost as much fun as reading the actual children’s books themselves.
This article appears in November 5 • 1999.