Between the ages of three and five, my daughter was obsessed with Pete the Cat. On any given day, I’d bet that 94.7% of her thoughts were about Pete the Cat. We read the books every night. We listened to the CDs that came with the books on every car ride. We bought backup Pete the Cat stuffed animals because she couldn’t fall asleep without them. We dressed up as Pete the Cat’s family for Halloween. (The day after Halloween, I realized I’d made the critical mistake of buying a handmade Pete shirt on Etsy. My daughter insisted on wearing that shirt every day for months, along with a long blue tail and cat ears. I asked the Etsy shop if they offered rush shipping.) For a while, she exclusively answered to the name “Bobby” (Pete’s brother is named Bob); this caused confusion at play groups. We waited in a mob at Barnes and Noble with hundreds of other screaming children to experience the toddler version of The Eras Tour: the chance to meet Pete the Cat in real life.
And all that time, I kept a secret: I’ve never particularly liked Pete the Cat. When one of the books first hit bestseller lists, I remember reading a copy and feeling puzzled. What was everyone seeing that I couldn’t? Was it the art? The text? I put Pete back on the shelf until 2018, when my daughter found a three book set at a Scholastic book fair.
Pete the Cat is just one example of a lesson that I’ve learned over and over again as a children’s book editor, as a reader, as a library assistant, as a parent: not every book is for you. More importantly: not every book should be for you. A publishing landscape curated around any one person’s ideals (no matter who that person is) would be a much narrower, duller, and more boring place. If books were only published according to my particular tastes, my daughter would never have experienced the pure joy of loving (LOV-ING) Pete the Cat. Perhaps she—and thousands of kids like her—would never have learned to love books and reading at all. (Thank you, Pete.)
I couldn’t help but think of Pete the Cat when I read a recent quote from Mac Barnett (bestselling children’s book author and current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature) that has caused a lot of discussion in the publishing community. In a section of his newly published adult book, Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, Mac Barnett discusses the number of didactic children’s books being published and writes, “I have a nagging fear that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole…maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.”
For more context on this quote and why it is especially troubling in today’s publishing climate, I encourage you to first read the response that bestselling author Tracey Baptiste posted yesterday.
Personally, my first thought when reading this quote was: says who? Really: who or what determines that a book is crud? Are all stories that aim to teach a lesson crud? Is the metric literary awards and starred reviews? Should we discount anything with huge sales numbers and immense popularity (sorry, Pete)?
Arguing about what constitutes ‘good’ art is not new; Mac Barnett’s quote is expanding on Theodore Sturgeon’s 1957 assertion that “ninety percent of everything is crud.” Traditional publishing itself is built around a relatively small group of tastemakers—literary agents, editors, and publishing teams—who together determine what stories they will champion and publish. This model is one of the reasons that publishing has been dominated by very few voices and perspectives for a very long time. Many people inside and outside the industry have been working hard to change that fact, all while facing increased challenges from book banners across the country.
The current publishing climate is one of the reasons why, as Tracey Baptiste notes, this quote hits differently in 2026. Book banners are fighting hard to eliminate books they see as ‘crud’. Books that puzzle them. Books that they don’t particularly like. Books that are not for them.
It is easy to criticize books; it’s much harder to champion and uplift them. But if we in the children’s publishing community truly care about children and value their myriad of perspectives, we must do exactly that. We must welcome more perspectives and voices to the table, not fewer. We must champion books that may not be written for us or our own children, but that another child will love. We must see the value in every book that speaks to a child.
Your Editor Friend,
Julie