Children's literature carries ideas about courage, justice, and kindness in a form stripped of the irony and defensive armour that adult fiction often adopts. Its willingness to state hope plainly is not naivety but a deliberate directness that adults have been trained to distrust.
Returning to children's books as an adult is not a retreat into childhood but a retrieval of a sharper, hungrier way of seeing that adulthood dulls. The old reader meets the old text and finds new meanings the child could not have reached, so the act compounds rather than repeats.
The author describes climbing out onto the rooftops of her Oxford college at night, treating the real adult world as a space still open to the kind of wonder and risk children's fiction trains you to seek. She offers this as evidence that the imaginative appetite built by such books persists and shapes how one actually lives.
Hope is framed not as a feeling that arrives but as a capacity that atrophies without use, and children's books are among the few cultural forms that still exercise it deliberately. Reading them becomes a way of keeping the apparatus of optimism functional against adult cynicism.
The capacity to imagine other lives, other outcomes, and other selves is presented as a practical tool for navigating a difficult world, not a luxury ornament. Children's books train this faculty intensively because they assume their readers will need it.