Synopsis
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'A magnificent piece of writing - funny and sharp and true. Every adult should read it, whether or not they have a child. I loved it.' - Katherine Rundell
Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children, a rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives.
Mac Barnett, the beloved, bestselling children's author and U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, urges us to think expansively about the potential of children's books-and the particular brilliance of young readers:
What if children are a great audience for art?
What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults?
What if humans' ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood?
Well, then we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books.
Barnett has published more than 60 children's books, which have been translated into 30+ languages and have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide, winning many international prizes along the way. Make Believe is his incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children's literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure.
Written with humor and academic rigor, Make Believe reads like a letter from one's smartest and funniest friend.
'A magnificent piece of writing - funny and sharp and true. Every adult should read it, whether or not they have a child. I loved it.' - Katherine Rundell
Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children, a rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives.
Mac Barnett, the beloved, bestselling children's author and U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, urges us to think expansively about the potential of children's books-and the particular brilliance of young readers:
What if children are a great audience for art?
What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults?
What if humans' ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood?
Well, then we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books.
Barnett has published more than 60 children's books, which have been translated into 30+ languages and have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide, winning many international prizes along the way. Make Believe is his incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children's literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure.
Written with humor and academic rigor, Make Believe reads like a letter from one's smartest and funniest friend.
Details
11 June 2026
9781806173143Imprint: Leap
Reviews
In his chatty, compulsively readable first book for adults, Mac Barnett champions his career choice and urges our culture to hold kids in higher esteem.
Make Believe transforms the sly, direct voice of Barnett's fiction into a sharp, ticklish, bracing polemic for adults. The book dismantles patronizing, outcome-oriented models of children's media and argues instead that children deserve art just as much as adults do.
Kids are very strange and original beings, and the books we send their way should be strange and original, too. Mac has shown this brilliantly in his own work, and here lays out an urgent path for the rest of us.
