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

Books

Culture

Politics

9 April 2025

4 min read

Is it OK to pray for the death of a dictator?

What happens when the mighty lose their thrones.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Bullet holes on a wall and white paint outlines mark the site of an execution

The wall where Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were executed.

NPR.

The end, when it comes, can be nasty, brutish and filmed.

Muammar Gaddafi, self-styled Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, spent the last moments of his life cowering in a Libyan sewer after an air strike on his convoy. On discovery, a mob subjected him to some ghastly final abuses before death – the kind of ending he had mercilessly condemned thousands to. It was almost biblical in its parabola, and it was recorded on a wobbly camera.

But it was not the first of its kind in this generation. On Christmas Day 1989, the disfigured face of Nicolae Ceausescu was broadcast on TV following his summary execution by hastily assembled opposition forces in Romania. Only days previously, he had been an unassailable dictator.

Vladimir Putin has spoken about Gaddafi’s ending, and it clearly troubles him, but perhaps Ceausescu’s death is lodged in the dark recesses of his mind because it was the one bloody end of all the communist leaders of eastern Europe.

Being a dictator is an all-consuming job. Too many domestic and foreign enemies are made along the way for the dictator to drop their vigilance. And their downfall often comes at the hands of those closest to them; by definition, these people know the dictator’s movements and weaknesses better than others and are best placed to exploit them. The military must be equipped to suppress dissent, but give it too much power and the generals pose a risk to the dictator. Yet if the military lacks the hardware, control of the population becomes harder. Many dictators surround themselves with specially trained loyal guards to defend against the military, but the rule of terror means no-one speaks the honest truth and so risks appear everywhere. No wonder dictators are usually paranoid and themselves racked with the fear that a culture of capricious violence induces in everyone.

These and other theories are explored by Marcel Dirsus in his compelling book How Tyrants Fall (John Murray, 2025). Dirsus notes how dictators require money, weapons and people to survive in office and for the elites around them to believe these goods will remain in place. They also need to immerse the surrounding elites in blood guilt, so that their fate becomes entwined with the dictator’s; Saddam Hussein compelled others to join him in the murder and execution of opponents.

For Dirsus, there are two ways to topple a tyrant. The most direct is to take them out, but this is rarely straightforward. Coup attempts are often shambolic in their planning and even well-orchestrated ones usually fail; the consequences for those implicated are always horrendous. The second route is patient and pragmatic, looking to weaken the tyrant, strengthen alternative elites and empower the masses. External powers often have minimal influence unless, like the US in Iraq, the country is invaded and the tyrant deposed. Sanctions often fail to hurt the elites; a state’s geographic proximity to the tyrant’s nation can be useful, as it gives a base from which opponents of the regime can work.

Modern technology is changing the face of political action, making it easier for large groups to mobilise against regimes, as seen in the short-lived Arab Spring. It also enables dictators to track opponents more successfully than even the feared Stasi in East Germany. Right now, it feels like the tyrants are ahead in this game.

Shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a friend said to me that he was praying for Putin’s death or downfall. I asked him how sure he was that the person who replaced Putin would be better. If the pragmatic route for toppling a dictator involves strengthening different elites and empowering the masses, the likelihood is that the elites will take over, not the masses. Dictators never allow the components of civil society to form; democratic institutions take decades to build. And they rarely anoint successors in advance, for fear alternative power bases are created. When dictators fall, it usually leads to initial chaos and violence before another elite can establish itself from which a new dictator will emerge.

In her inspired song of praise at the news she would give birth to the long-awaited Messiah, Mary observes how God ‘has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly’. It is a role reversal typical of St Luke, recorder of Mary’s song, a gift of eschatology many want realised today, not just in the world to come. When the powerful are brought down from their throne today, they are typically replaced by the next most powerful person, and if the throne remains vacant or is contested, what follows often feels like the spirit that went out of a person in Matthew Gospel returning with seven other spirits more evil than itself, meaning ‘the last state of person is worse than the first’.

This need not be a counsel of despair, but a call to informed intercessory prayer which is short on controlling advice for God’s geo-political strategy, and long on the wisdom and patience of the one throne that endures.

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