Elizabeth Turner’s The Daisy Explores a Deadly World
The Daisy is a book of morality and behavioral verses for four- to eight-year-olds, guiding their moral compass. In one lesson, “Dressed or Undressed,´ parents with stubborn children refusing to change out of their night clothes are encouraged to let them stay in their sleepwear. But they are also told to withhold food and play. In The Daisy, good children are rewarded, bad children are punished, sometimes fatally. The verse “Poisonous Fruit,” finds Tommy and his sister Jane coming across berries as they wandered down a lane. They picked and ate some of them, playing with or throwing away others. Shortly after they got home, they felt ill and went to bed. They died of berry poisoning. The lesson of the story is quite clear: Leave forest berries alone.