"Once you’ve agreed what makes a in the first place (which isn’t as easy as one might think…), I think the basic measures of quality for children’s fiction are the same as for adult fiction. How well ted, how well imagined, the commitment to a voice and the skill in realizing it, the aliveness of the s, the vividness of the world, the originality and wit and surprise and charm and everything else that demanding readers look for in great writing. Books for younger children tend to be heavily illustrated, in a way that most adult books aren’t (more’s the pity…), a fact that of course brings with it a whole other set of ways in which a book can succeed or fail. (The illustrations and their relationship to the text aren’t, of course, minor factors incidental to the substance of the book, they are among the hardest things to get perfectly right.)"