Subjects may once have been limited, but they are not so any longer. Today, those writers who create out of our own special collective consciousness can lead us. . . we can slip back in time with O.R. Melling to the days of the Druids or go far into the future through the pages of Monica Hughes's Crisis on Conshelf Ten. We can be swept off into the fantastical through Marie-Louise Gay's Voyage au clair de lune or Roger Paré's L'Alphabet. We can engage in adventures as disparate as those of Eric Wilson's The Kootenay Kidnapper or Robert Soulières's L'Homme aux oiseaux. The opportunities, in fact, go on and on.
The adult vainly trying to encourage the child lost in the pages of an anthology such as Planéria to turn to homework may view these "opportunities" with disfavour, seeing them merely as a means of escape. This can indeed be a factor. Lucy Maud Montgomery acknowledges in her diaries how books were a place to hide during an unhappy childhood. Roch Carrier, author of Le Chandail de hockey, will recount how he became an avid reader rather than display his ineptitude as an athlete a dozen times a day.
A story told by children's writer Jean Little sheds further light on the nature of this "escape", however. In her autobiography Little by Little, she describes how, as a child, she got lost on the streetcar. Due to a visual disability, she simply could not see her stop. Little then says that after she was rescued and tucked safely in bed she asked her mother to read her a story. Why? Because she needed the story "to come between me and the difficult things ...." 1
This explanation suggests that she was not so much escaping, as putting the world for a while at some distance. She tells us, out of her own experience, that books -- with their beginnings and middles and endings, their organization and sense of "rightness" -- offer a place where the world can be embraced as manageable again. In so doing, Jean Little lets us know we can trust that even when children choose "escape" they will be gone only for as long as they need to build within themselves the wherewithal for setting out once more.
 
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