It has become too popular to write children's books with poop in focus.
This was stated by the Västerbotten courier's cultural editor Sara Meidell in a column the other day.
She lists titles like Alla poop !, Super-Charlie and the poop explosion, The Poop Party and When Doris Should Poop.
The drop was the launch of the latest poop book: "Hi poop sausage", written by the author and commercialist Henrik Hallgren.
- There has been title after title where poop is some kind of theme: it's animals that poop, little siblings who poop, it's poop sausages in different characters.
It is not possible to trace any other purpose than that you want to pick easy-to-buy flabb points, says Sara Meidell.
Eva Dahlin, children's book publisher at Bonnier Carlsén who published Hej Bajskorv !, does not agree.
"It is a pity that a children's book reviewer categorically writes that the quota for the number of poop books and dinosaur books is full.
I look at it differently.
Books can be told in a thousand different ways ", she writes in an email to Kulturnyheterna.
"Is it dramatic to poop?"
Actually, it is not the poop itself that is the problem, says Sara Meidell.
She highlights Pernilla Stalfeldt's "Bajsboken" and ALMA laureate Wolf Erlbruch's "It was the most cheeky!"
(about a mole that got a poop sausage in its head) as an example of well-written and ambitious poop books.
But all too often, "a poop sausage" seems to be enough to publish a book that is otherwise of low quality.
This indicates a cynical commercial attitude from the publishers, she says.
- There is no reason to put a family of poop sausages in a story where nothing happens except that it is just poop.
It is extremely banal literature without wholehearted ambitions to make good children's literature.
I think children are much more complex than that.
Can it not be good and even important to de-dramatize the poop?
- Is it dramatic to poop?
Do children really think so?
I do not know if it is so ...
"Meidell reduces children's literature"
Eva Dahlin, children's book publisher at Bonnier Carlsén, thinks that Sara Meidell's reasoning reduces the children's book genre.
Sara Meidell herself mentions poop book classics and award-winning poop books, and it becomes incomprehensible to me how a literature reviewer can be so uninterested in how future writers and illustrators can approach a familiar subject in a new way.
From my point of view, it is an approach that does not take children's literature seriously, or the profession of author and illustrator seriously, but reduces literature to a subject.
I look forward to future masterpieces about dinosaur poop ”.