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We "discovered" the Junie B. Jones books earlier this year and have had a lot of fun reading through the entire series with Charlotte as her bedtime stories. We've read almost all of the books that take place in her kindergarten, and have even jumped ahead a few to read several of the first grade adventures. Charlotte gets a lot of enjoyment out of the stories, and I get to have fun coming up with all the voices of the characters.
When we first learned about the series, I believe it was Charlotte's kindergarten teacher who told us about them. Right off the bat she let us know that sometimes Junie B. does not use correct grammar or correct words. Okay, fine. Five-year-olds are not known for their impeccable grammar or grasp of English verb tense exceptions. It's to be expected, particularly in the context of being used in a novel where the main character is the narrator AND a five-year-old to boot. But who knew this was such a heated battle among parents?
Frankly, I don't expect every single thing my child encounters to have to be a formal learning experience. I suspect that a lot of the people who are so upset about Junie B. Jones are also the sort of people who feel their children should wear a helmet at all times and never eat anything that wasn't personally hand-grown by their own private organic farmer. Indeed, isn't one of the ways we improve our command of the language through being exposed to its improper use in a way that helps us understand the errors being made? We're already turning into a society full of illiterate morons, drowning in an ocean of bad grammar, bad taste, and bad judgment; you would think that people could see this as an opportunity to point out the errors and share a little one-on-one parent-child education.
It's not that I don't have a few criticisms of the books myself. It's pretty obvious to me that Barbara Park, the author, is writing for theparents as much if not more than the children who hear these stories. Sometimes too much so. A lot of Junie B.'s speech affectations and word choices are meant to deliberately draw a laugh from the grown-up reader and are somewhat lost on the child. It's okay in small doses, but as the cumulative effect of reading the books builds up, it gets old. If she really wants to write to the adults, then the affectations do not need to be so in-your-face, and some attention should go to developing the adult characters who appear routinely in the books but as little more than flabbergasted foils. Character development of everyone other than Junie B. is pretty much non-existant. But I think those are minor quibbles.
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