Review

Books

Culture

29 December 2023

5 min read

How children’s books challenge us to hope harder

Reading an award-winning children’s book challenges Elizabeth Wainwright much more than expected - to imagine and hope.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A close up of face, showing an eye, mostly obscured by a closely-held open book.

This year, the Waterstones book of the year prize was awarded to Impossible Creatures, a fantasy book for children by Katherine Rundell. This was not the children’s book of the year; this was overall book of the year – it beat novels and non-fiction books for adults. I felt momentarily but deeply joyful when I heard the news and was curious why.

During the pandemic, I found myself unable to read the non-fiction books I usually turn too. Even adult fiction felt heavy. It was children’s books and authors I turned to. Philip Pullman, Dodie Smith, Alan Garner, Ursula K Le Guin. Others new to me. On reflection, I wasn’t reading these books because they were in any way easier, because they weren’t – they asked me to think and hope and imagine much harder than a lot of adult books, despite everything the news would have me believe. And it is for that very reason that I sought these books out. The Waterstones prize made me think a bit more about this – and why it might matter now especially.

Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

First, I thought about my time as a District Councillor in local government. Here, I quickly learned all sorts of things about planning, environment, community, working across opposition and more. I needed to call on my perseverance, patience, strategic thinking. But the things that I found myself calling on again and again were imagination and relationship-building. Building relationships – especially with people who weren’t like me – was the only way to get things done. And imagination because it’s the thing that recreates, that sees things as they could be not as they are. Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”, and I’ve seen how that’s true. It did not feel enough, for example, to try to fix problems of dwindling budgets with more cuts and more inefficient meetings. Instead, imagination asked me to think about what this budget-setting process might look like at its best, and how the wider community might help us decide priorities, and how we might restructure our work so that the District doesn’t just scrape by, but thrives. It asked me to step out of business-as-usual, and imagine business-as-it-could-be.

Jesus too shows us the importance of imagination – he so often called out who he saw people to be, not who they were. And he points us now towards what is yet to come. He calls us to wait, and to trust in his arrival – however distant it might feel. Children’s books often do this too: Frodo trusting that the ring would be destroyed, imagining life outside of the grip of the darkness of Mordor, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bastian’s imagination helping to save Fantasia in the Neverending Story. Jo March showing the possibility of another kind of life in Little Women. Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful.

Second, the children’s books I read during lockdown gave me hope in a way that books for adults didn’t at the time. Hope is, I think, innately tied to imagination. It asks us to look ahead, even when things aren’t clear, and walk forward. Rebecca Solnit explores hope, optimism, and activism in her short book Hope In the Dark. She says,

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

I think the best children’s literature shows us how to hope, and shows us what right action can look like when we invoke that hope. In Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, Mal and Christopher must save the ‘Archipelago’ – where mythical creatures still live – and the world beyond them from a growing darkness. Hope shines bright, reminding the reader that it is not naïve but necessary and world-changing, if we let it be. Hope changes things. In the New Testament, Paul tells that along with faith and love, hope will remain. When it feels like the world – fictional, or real – is falling away, hope will remain. Coupled with imagination, bound with faith and love, made active with hands and hearts, it might just pull us through to things we cannot yet see.

When she won the National Book Award, Ursula K Le Guin underlined the necessity of imagination and hope right now:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Jesus was the ultimate realist of a larger reality. He asks us to love in the face of hate, to believe that food and wine can come from faith, to believe so hard in love – not as a pink heart-shaped commodity, but as a world-shaking force – that we might literally see resurrection. Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time, grounded in people and soil and society, but always pointing to the bigger truth he knew, and to a world that did not yet exist. I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful. Importantly, this is not a rejection of the world as it is – we are called to love our neighbours here and now, to build the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But in what is, there is the seed of what could be, there is a light that shines in places that are still dark. I think the gospel, and the best children’s books, help us to see that light and see what it might illuminate. Jesus knew that children’s minds were perhaps better at seeing this light – he even says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Allowing ourselves to imagine, to hope, is perhaps the only way we’ll take the kingdom of heaven seriously here on earth.

Katherine Rundell herself has pointed out that children’s books don’t just make good readers, they make good people. I think that with imagination, hope, courage, and more, they help call forth the people we are becoming, and the world that could become. That is why I turned to them during lockdowns, that is why I turn to them now as parts of our world seem dark, and that is why I turn again and again to Jesus – the ultimate realist of a larger reality.

Review

Art

Culture

Music

Romanticism

Taylor Swift

6 October 2025

5 min read

Taylor Swift’s new album is fine, and that might be the problem

Ego, art, and the quiet tragedy of getting everything you ever wanted

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Taylor Swift, dressed as a showgirl, sips from a glass.

Taylor Swift, showgirl.

Taylorswift.com

Taylor Swift released an album last week and, from what I can see, the world seems to hate it.

Life of a Showgirl was written and recorded while Taylor was on her two-year-long Era’s tour, hence the album’s title. She would fly to Sweden between tour dates to record with the infamous producers, Max Martin and Shellback. This matters. Why? Well, because this means that each song on this album has grown out of the soil of unfathomable success; record-breaking numbers and history-making impact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Era’s tour shifted the landscape of popular culture. Many critics have reflected on this context, citing ‘burnout’ and ‘frazzle’ as reasons why this album sits far below Taylor’s usual standard.

They implore Taylor to take a day off: put her feet up, recuperate, and re-gather her musical senses.

Then there are the critics who seem to be directing blame toward Taylor’s obvious happiness. If you didn’t know, she’s engaged to American footballer, Travis Kelce – and they, as a couple, are sickly sweet. Honestly, they’re defiantly mushy. They’re cheesy to the point of protest. They’re just happy – and, apparently, therein lies the problem. I’ve heard more than one critic quote Oscar Wilde in their takedown of Swift’s latest offering:

‘In this world there are only two tragedies: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it’.

This album, they say, is proof that Taylor Swift is victim to the latter kind of tragedy. She’s got everything one could ever want, and the world seems pretty agreed that her music is suffering because of it. We like to keep our artists tortured, thank you.

For the record, I don’t hate the album. But I don’t love it either. I resonate with The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis who writes that it simply ‘floats in one ear and out the other’. There’s nothing to hate about it, which, I guess, also means there’s very little to love about it. I’m not outraged, nor am I enamoured – and I say that gingerly, because I fear that’s the worst review of all.

So, in some ways I’m agreeing with the general consensus – Life of a Showgirl is not Taylor Swift’s best work. I don’t, however, think that her success, nor her happiness, are quite to blame for it. I think those are slightly lazy critiques, they’re shallow scapegoats.

I think, rather, the problem with this album is that Taylor has made herself the biggest thing within it.

When introducing the album on Instagram, she thanked her collaborators for helping her to ‘paint this self-portrait’ – the strange thing is that this ‘self-portrait’ feels considerably less honest or authentic than her previous, more conceptual, albums.

I’ve spent a couple of days wondering why this is and have come up with two theories.

Firstly, we tend to be far more honest to and about ourselves when we’re able to kid ourselves into thinking that it’s not actually our own selves that we’re talking about. For example, I think of Billie Eilish’s Grammy and Academy Award-winning song – What Was I Made For? – which she wrote to accompany Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. In an interview, Billie explained how writing a song about a Barbie somehow allowed her the space and freedom to create the most honest, raw, and revealing song she’d ever written.

We’re self-preserving creatures, you see.

If we’re knowingly speaking of, writing about, painting or in any way presenting ourselves - our ego gets in the way, preferring us to offer the world a shiny, carefully constructed façade.

Taylor, in intentionally painting a ‘self-portrait’, has unknowingly offered us less than herself.

And, now for my second theory. Every good self-portrait is actually about something bigger than its subject; they are able to point toward something more universal than the individual reflected. I think of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, the way she used her hair to communicate societal expectations, or how she framed herself with wildlife, or the time she painted a necklace of thorns around her own neck – leaving an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of the beholder’s stomach as they think about the nature of pain and liberty. She painted herself, endlessly. Kahlo pointed to herself in order to point through herself – she was never the subject that she was most interested in, she was never the biggest thing in her own self-portrait.

Like I say, the problem with Taylor Swift’s okay-ish album is simply that she is the biggest thing within it. The key ingredient it’s lacking is awe; it leaves nothing to marvel at.

And that’s rare for Taylor.

I’ve often written that she is a Romantic in every sense of the word; concerned with the feelings and experiences that are powerful enough to knock us off our feet: big feelings, big thoughts, big truths, big questions, big mysteries, big language. These things have always been baked into her lyrics.

This album, in comparison, feels small. It doesn’t transcend Taylor Swift’s feelings about – well, Taylor Swift. She hasn’t quite managed to point through herself, she is the sole subject of her own self-portrait.

And therein lies its OK-ness.

Honestly? Therein lies all of our OK-ness. Taylor Swift may be anomalous in many things, but not in this - the presence of ego means that we’re all prone to self-portrait-ise ourselves. Left unchecked we are (or at least, we can be), what Charles Taylor calls, ‘buffered selves’; thinking of ourselves as the maker and subject of all meaning, shielded from awe and wonder.

But the best art will never flow from those who think themselves the biggest and deepest subject. Because, quite simply, we’re not.

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