Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz

Author:Judy Budnitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427014
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

In the middle of the night she reads to him, books she loved as a child. She knows he doesn’t understand, but the sound of her voice puts him to sleep.

One night she reads:

The gypsies came and stole the child away in the dead of night. They came all a-creeping, silent and slinking. It used to happen all the time, you know; every family had a story of a dear little lost one. But most people don’t know that it still goes on. The gypsies take only the naughty, the pretty children. Children are so ugly nowadays.

They carried the children off in great sacks, bouncing against their backs, to the gypsy market, where they were sold to the diamond mines where the shafts are too small for a grown man, or to the factories that need tiny fingers to tighten screws. Or to the circuses to feed the lions and tigers.

We like the circus, the children said. We like lions and tigers.

Oh-ho, the gypsies said, they will like you too.

It’s an old book, full of racial stereotypes, grisly violence. She’s surprised by how frightening it is. Long after Gabe dozes off she sits up, reading ahead, unable to sleep, afraid to turn the light off. The glowing yellow eyes in the illustrations follow her around after she closes the book.

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