Lessons of Tolerance and the Burden of History: Multiculturalism in Eric Walters’s <em>Royal Ransom</em>

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt from this article: The problem of rendering difficult history accessible to children is significant, Dieter Petzold suggests, insofar as it requires both that we acknowledge the embarrassments of social injustice and racism and that we communicate them to an audience “whose innocence (many people feel) needs to be protected” (189). In what follows, I will suggest that the problem of rendering the complex effects of historical injustice legible to young readers in a multicultural present offers equally notable challenges. My focus here is a recent attempt to articulate multicultural values in children’s literature: Royal Ransom, a contemporary young adult novel by Canadian author Eric Walters.