I feel privileged to review this book. It is a big book in every way: number of pages, length of chapters, range of material, and depth of thought. This is a book worthy of its argument. I mean by this that the form of The Hidden Adult manifests the book's themes; it is a scholarly and a creative achievement. One of the features that Nodelman identifies as typical of children's literature as a genre is its insistence on repetition and variation. Children's books demonstrate repetition in a variety of ways: in plots, in recurring character types, in language, in patterns, and so on. They do this in order to educate their readers, repetition being an efficacious pedagogical device, and the variation that creeps into the repetition is a way of deepening what the reader learns. A similar pedagogic use of repetition and variation occurs in The Hidden Adult. Nodelman repeats the main themes of his book over and over, but he does so each time in a different manner, with different theoretical language. And so we read about how the theories of the likes of Bourdieu, Said, Derrida, Lacan, Hardt, and Negri relate to the ambiguity of children's literature as a genre. This is a book that both deepens as it goes along and returns to its beginnings as it closes.