How important is it for children's books to be pedagogical? I love Tollbooth when it is just playing around, Milo and co. tripping around the country side having improbable things happen to them; but in several instances it gets kind of heavy-handed and annoying. -- Annoying to me as an adult, I hasten to say; I don't think this occurred to me as a child. And of course now I can't think of any of the instances in question, to direct your attention to them; I think there may have been a moment or two when he was at the Soundkeeper's castle, and again when he was with Rhyme and Reason.

...And speaking of rodent literature for children, has anybody read Desperaux? It has a deformed mouse for a hero and a Newbery medal to its name. But seems to me formulaic and poorly written. And extremely heavy-handed with the pedagogy.

Sylvia's take on it seemed a bit strange to me. quite early in the book (which I'm reading to her for bedtime stories) we were in agreement about it being no good -- but rather than switch over to a potentially better book, of which we have a couple lined up, she wanted to see this one through to the end.

Yargh, wait, no, we weren't talking about rodents at all, were we? Somehow my brain told me this was a thread about NIMH; but it is not. Feel free, please, to delete the above or simply not to approve it; it is even less appropriate to a Tollbooth thread than it would be to a NIMH thread.

I made a reference to Redwall on Unfogged, if you feel any better. IIRC, our Mystery Children's Author Friend was down on Desperaux, but I may be mistaken.

Is Sylvia a compulsive book finisher? I'm very happy to have trained myself away from that, although I've somewhat gone too far the other way.

I think there may have been a moment or two when he was at the Soundkeeper's castle, and again when he was with Rhyme and Reason.

Seeing as the whole book is more or less predicated on the fact that Milo is a pretty uninteresting fellow at the start, a lot of the encounters he has with others have a pedagogical element. Specifically with regard to Rhyme and Reason I suspect you are thinking of bits like this:

"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons."

Yeah -- that's approximately it. I mean taken by itself that line, or any of the other individual lines I'm thinking of, is sweet and unobjectionable -- the repetition can seem a little cloying though. Juster's beautiful voice does a lot to make it palatable.

Is Sylvia a compulsive book finisher

I think so -- I know I am or have been -- she frequently wants to check, when we're reading a long book, how far along we are and what portion of the current chapter we have read. (Interesting biscuit conditional.)