Are Children’s Books So Stylistically Different from Books for Adults?

Just saw the following in a NYTimes review of J.K. Rowling’s new adult novel.  So I’m wondering — is this really so true? Seems rather an overgeneralization to me.

Rowling has not been able to shed certain stylistic features that are acceptable or even expected from children’s authors. Juvenile literature often uses physical metaphors to highlight emotional states because in children the two tend to be so closely allied. “The Casual Vacancy” has various characters feeling guilt “clawing” at their “insides,” a “hollowness in the stomach,” fear “fluttering” inside the “belly,” a “queasy” stomach, a “lowering in the pit” of the stomach, a “knot” in the stomach. In adult fiction, it isn’t necessary to load so many actions — or objects — with adverbs and adjectives. Children thrive on heavily signposted plots, on moral exposition masked as dialogue. Adults don’t need or want such direction.

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Something About Frank Cotrell Boyce

“Being read to at school changed my life. I really became aware of that during the Olympics because we were all of us in that room drawing on stuff we’d read as children and none of it was stuff we were examined on, it wasn’t anything measurable. It was stuff that people had shared with us that we went on to share. If you look at that ceremony and what was in it, it was a sense of wonderment in storytelling. We found we had this common heritage – Mary Poppins and so on.”

Lovely Guardian profile of Frank Cotrell Boyce.