Book Reviews

imagination and educative play—as well
as a self-perpetuating sales logic rooted in
the notion of the system—accrue aroundthe toys while bolstering a broader commodification of creativity. Alongside this,he argues that LEGO’s construction system
has evolved into more than a set of “mediatoys,” acting instead as a “toy medium” (p.
vi) of expression that can encompass multiple forms of play and cultural resonances.
Chapter 1 focuses on the notionof bricolage to explore how LEGO toys
articulate meaning at the granular levelof their forms, attachment methods, andassembly into both packaged play sets
and consumer-generated constructions.
Lee dwells in detail on the semiotics ofLEGO components, teasing out the tensions between representational specificity
and open-endedness. He notes that creative reuse of components—croissants asa building cornice—can resist their builtin significations and preserve the spiritof invention through building. While thesemantic lessons are clear from Lee’s formal analyses, the discussion leaves open
the question of where the figure of theengineer (the totalizing foil to the tinkering bricoleur in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s

Deconstructing LEGO:
The Medium and Messagesof LEGO Play
Jonathan Rey Lee
Switzerland: AG, 2020. Preface, works
cited, acknowledgments, contents, list offigures, and footnotes. 377 pp. $103.06
cloth, $69.64 paper, $63.00 kindle. ISBN:978303053644
Jonathan Rey Lee’s Deconstructing LEGO:
The Medium and Messages of LEGO Playbrings a media studies approach to thecritical consideration of LEGO’s popular
plastic bricks and minifigures, which havebecome near-ubiquitous icons of childhood (and, increasingly, adulthood). Thebook joins a growing body of scholarship across disciplines that turns a critical eye on the Danish company’s claimsof universality and innate creativity for its
mass-produced playthings. A substantial
preface serves as an introduction, in which
Lee explains his main analytical project:using a Derridean tool kit of deconstruction “to interrogate the processes of ideological formation implicit in the scriptive
design of LEGO play” (p. ix), unpacking
how the company’s stated philosophies of99

100AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYinfluential theorizing) might fit in relationto LEGO’s durable corporate image.
From here, the book’s five core chapters each explore a different modality ofplay that Lee identifies as key componentsof LEGO’s toy designs and its expansion
into a wider range of media forms. Chapter 2 deals with the most obvious suchmodality, construction play. The ideal of“pure” construction as a key to creativity
is a consistent thread through decades ofLEGO marketing (and through the longer
tradition of block play, steeped in Enlightenment conceptions of childhood andeducation) and nostalgia for what older
adults perceive as “real LEGO,” wholesome
bricks without the frank commercialism oflicensed play sets. But as Lee shows here,
this privileging of abstraction is largely amyth—cultivated by corporate marketingand fan communities alike—projected retrospectively onto the company’s history,
overwriting the bricks’ roots in representation, long-standing architectural tropes,
and middle-class values of domesticity.
Chapter 3 turns from “housing play”
to “playing house” (p. 65), focusing on therelationship between LEGO toys, dramaticplay, and gender differentiation in designand marketing. Lee briefly sets LEGO in ahistorical tradition of dollhouses and toy
theaters before presenting a case study ofthe famously criticized Friends productline. Lee suggests that Friends, beyond
its stereotypically feminized design cues,
essentializes dramatic storytelling as afeminine quality, a marked “other” toostensibly gender-neutral (but really boycoded) construction play. Extending thisinquiry to earlier products like LEGO’s
1970s Homemaker series, or to the narrative dimension of LEGO’s more tradition-

ally masculine offerings (castles, pirates,
the Wild West), could have added additional complexity to a familiar binary andbolstered Lee’s contention that construction and dramatic play are not mutually
exclusive or, indeed, easily disentangledfrom one another.
The next three chapters trade the longer historical framing of preceding chapters for LEGO’s more recent forays into
wider spheres of entertainment. Chapter
4 explores LEGO’s expansion into virtual
media through video games and toys withweb- or app-based components. In digital
LEGO play, Lee argues, a curious reversal appears at work. Though video games
present limitless design opportunities,
LEGO insists on strict verisimilitude for
digital replicas of its physical toys; meanwhile, the company plays up the modularity and pixelated quality of its tangible
products as cognates for the underlying
logics of the digital world—a savvy bid
for relevance as children’s attention drifts
increasingly toward screens.
Lee continues in familiar media studies territory to consider the company’stransmedia engagement of external stories through the hugely popular Star Wars
product line (chapter 5) and its attempts
at authoring its own narratives in the distinctly transmedial and cross-genre films
The LEGO Movie and its sequel (chapter 6).
In the latter chapter, his intriguing discussion of “attachment play”—and how thecompany positions its products as objectsof emotional attachment and vehicles forsocial connection—pushes scholarly conversation on LEGO in a generative newdirection, but it is also where we feel theabsence of ethnographic research mostkeenly. Lee is attentive to the relativeBook Reviews

inaccessibility of children’s actual play formany scholars, careful to warn early onthat his media-focused methods do notgrapple with ethnographic observation or
allow for a descriptive theory of children’s
LEGO experiences. At times, though, thelack of a situated social agent at the heartof the analysis leaves LEGO play itself as
the actor under discussion, as if it were anentity independent of its players or corporate creators. Lee is better able to avoid thistrouble when discussing the LEGO play ofadults (much better-documented than thatof children, especially regardling onlinecommunities). The short postscripts that
follow each chapter, with case studies ofartworks or fan productions that complicate LEGO’s corporate narratives, offersome of the book’s best insights about playin actual practice.
A short final chapter sums up andoffers sandbox play as an integrative wayof thinking about LEGO as a medium—a play modality that can encompass thediverse others Lee sees operating in
LEGO’s toys and its wider media entanglements. Thus, his deconstruction of LEGO
also becomes a reconstruction, resulting not in “any single ethical critique
but . . . ongoing critical interventions into
the dynamic spaces of LEGO play” (p.
238) with the interpretive tools offered bypoststructuralist, phenomenological, andfeminist theory. Although Lee convincingly makes the case that the toy’s deep
imbrication in popular culture and heavy
grip on contemporary childhood makethe serious study of LEGO worthwhile,the book nevertheless left me wanting abetter sense of the broader cultural stakesat hand. What larger lessons, external toLEGO, might we take from this analysisof how the company mobilizes designed
playthings, charismatic narratives, andthe fraught ideology of creativity as commodity? Perhaps the difficulty in breaking
beyond the “spaces of LEGO play” indicates LEGO’s deeper success in naturalizing its tightly controlled, self-containedbrand as synonymous with play itself.
—Colin Fanning, Bard Graduate Center,New York, NY

Prescriptive Play Therapy:
Tailoring Interventions forSpecific Childhood Problems
Heidi Gerard Kaduson, Donna Cangelosi,and Charles E. Schaefer, eds.
New York: 2020. About the editors,
contributors, preface, and index. 276 pp.
$29.75 paper. ISBN: 9781462541676
Anyone familiar with play therapy knows
Charles E. Schaefer, the cofounder, alongwith Kevin O’Connor, of the Association for Play Therapy in 1982. Schaefer’s
clinical and scholarly contributions tothe discipline, and with them, our understanding of its powerful role in helping
children, have been unparalleled. And
those who have followed and applied thefruits of the burgeoning field in their own
clinical work know well the many seminal
contributions that coeditors Heidi Kaduson and Donna Cangelosi have brought
to the field. So, who better to bring thisimportant volume, Prescriptive Play Therapy, to our attention?
In the clinical field, there are the purists who adhere to one favored and empirically supported mode of treatment, such101