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At the outset, let me acknowledge that I have no research to back up the statement above. No scientific studies to cite; I haven't even taken a poll. My only authority comes from my having raised seven boys, all of whom, I'm glad to say, are happily married, gainfully employed, and still speaking to me on a regular basis. (I am also the mother of a lovely, intelligent daughter, but her story will have to come at another time.) I acknowledge, too, that not everything I say here will be true of all boys, and that some of my observations will apply to girls too. Still...

When my first child was born, I was disconcerted to learn, as I swam groggily to consciousness, that I had given birth to a boy. Of course, I'd known this was theoretically possible, but since I had no brothers, no neighborhood boys to play with as a child, and had gone to a woman's college, I kind of assumed that God would know I wasn't equipped to be the mother of a boy. Let alone another boy. And then another, et cetera, et cetera, until my sons numbered five (I'll get to the seven part later).

As my sons grew older and their number increased, I made some interesting observations. Number one: No matter what the intended purpose of a toy might be, a boy would immediately consider it something to take apart, to use as a hammer or a drumstick, or to convert into some sort of military weapon.

Number two: Boys are incapable of holding still. I am convinced that as grade-schoolers, were such diagnoses then available (along with their pharmaceutical remedies), my boys would all have been labeled hyper-active, overly distractible, and possibly of below average mentality. In view of their later achievements and those of a number of boys I have tutored, I've come to the conclusion that boys should always start school a year later than girls, and that they should never be expected to sit quietly for more than ten minutes at a time until they reach the age of maturity, which is usually about forty-six. (Sometimes older)

Number three: Boys occupy at least twice as much space as girls do. Watch a group of three or four girls. They can entertain themselves for hours just sitting on the top of a stoop with books or crayons or dolls. During the same amount of time, boys will need the front and back yards of four or five houses, preferable furnished with trees for climbing, bushes for hiding in, and one or two areas where digging is allowed.

My oldest son was thirteen and my youngest two when I realized that these boys were not meant for suburbia. They needed space to stretch their burgeoning wings. I thought a house surrounded by four or five acres of woods would be just about right. Unfortunately, acreage of that size in or close to Cincinnati was more than our budget could handle and I couldn't convince my husband of the advisability of a move to Australia where there was still that whole lovely Outback to explore.

We compromised by selling our five room ranch-style house at a loss (something IRS agents found unbelievable - obviously none of them had ever seen what five boys can do to a house), and moving to a three-story Victorian on the other side of town.

For a while, exploring a new neighborhood provided sufficient outlet for the boys' ne

How do you know when you’re on the road to a bizarre and hilarious interview experience?  Well, when your interviewee (in our case today one Dale E. Basye) starts matters off like this, it’s a big clue:

Dale E Basye: Just so you know, I don't answer any personal questions or questions regarding my books, writing (in general), world events, history, new math, new Coke, or the New Deal. Anything else is fair game though.

And if your mental reaction when you read those words goes something like this: Huh.  Well, two can play at this game, sir.  Well, then it’s practically guaranteed:

KinderScares: Luckily for you we don’t like math, prefer Pepsi to Coke, have no interest in Depression-era economics, and pretty much only mention books or writing in the most roundabout of ways.  How about pancakes?  Do you answer questions about pancakes?  There we go, our first question:

Rapacia: The Second Circle Of Heck

Written by: Dale E. Basye

Illustrations by: Bob Dob

Random House, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-375-84077-7

We reviewed Heck: Where The Bad Kids Go (go read the review if you’re new to the Heck series!) a couple months ago when we were just getting this blog up and running.  After generally raving about it, we mentioned that we couldn't wait to read the next book.  We wanted it really badly.  And immediately!  We wanted it badly enough to pay for it in hardcover (I know...who does that?).  And then bring it home and fight over it.  And then complain about having to wait for the third book, which we also want NOW.

We’d like to believe it was the subject matter rubbing off on us, because we’re not usually like that (or so we’d have you believe...).  Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck is all about greed!  Milton has escaped Heck and made it back to ‘the Stage’ (otherwise known as the land of the living).  Left behind, his sister Marlo takes the blame and ends up a little deeper in Heck than she was before - in Rapacia.

What makes a good children's book? I'd suppose that's a tough question to answer, otherwise Microsoft would have already written Newbery Notebook 1.0 and Caldecott Creator for Windows. A good children's book is far from formulaic.

• It may help you understand why some books win with children while others fail. The list explains, for example, why a common literary motif of many children's novels (Harry Potter, Lord of the Flies, Narnia, Holes) is the removal of the protagonist (and other main characters) from adult supervision and control.
• The individual attributes may help you create some connections between otherwise unrelated texts. One successful exercise with every novel, for example, is looking at how a character grows or changes over time. I've used this approach with Number the Stars, Because of Winn Dixie, Crash, Flipped, and Island of the Blue Dolphins to name just a few. Check out this sample recording sheet.
• The list can be used a fairly accurate indicator of a book's overall value when teachers must choose just two or three titles for study. Many teachers, for example, complain that their boys just don't "get into" books which fe
  1 Comments on What Makes a Good Children's Book?, last added: 1/2/2010
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  Theresa Milstein said, on 1/2/2010 10:56:00 AM
  

  I like your list of book. As an assistant, I ran reading groups over a number of years, and found that a strong character that males or females could relate to was more important than the sex of the character. I read, Because of Winn Dixie to a mixed group, and all got into it. But a book like, Princess Academy would only work with a girls' group because of the subject matter.

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Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome, is a tremendously entertaining and often emotionally affecting story about, among other things, cruelty and pity. King has called Lord of the Flies "the book that changed my life", and its influence feels especially strong here, where a Maine town is turned into an island when a mysterious, invisible dome suddenly covers it, and adults begin to behave like the children in Golding's novel. There are political overtones to the book, with the main villain, "Big Jim" Rennie, sounding an awful lot like Big Dick Cheney; with crisis turned into political opportunity; with fear used as a tool for consolidating power; with brutality replacing sense. These connections to the world outside the book are important, sometimes amusing and sometimes even insightful, but they're also obvious (intentionally so, I'd bet). More complex and interesting is the novel's narrative voice and how it relates to the revelation of what created the Dome.

(It is here, dear reader, that you should depart if you have not read the novel and do not want to learn important details of plot and situation, for I shall soon be writing about some of the primary mysteries of the tale........)

One of the ideas propelling the narrative of Under the Dome is that it is a rare person who will not, under the right circumstances, behave in a cruel and brutal way. There's nothing particularly profound about this -- we all know about the Milgram experiments, after all -- but it's one of those ideas that proves particularly fruitful for storytellers. In Lord of the Flies, Golding found a powerful template for such an idea, and King has extended it to the world of adults, although the adults who are self-reflective and try for decency often think back to the shames and cruelties of childhood. Shame for the decent people usually comes as much from complicity as from the commission of crimes: Dale "Barbie" Barbara, the primary protagonist-hero of Under the Dome carries tremendous guilt for having stood by while soldiers under his command tortured and killed a man in Iraq. Barbie's shame mixes at the end with the very different shame of the other protagonist-hero, Julia, who helps evoke a sort of pity from the alien child controlling the Dome by projecting her memories of abasement at the hands of the children who had attacked her in elementary school along with Barbie's memories of Fallujah, and the effect is to cause the alien child to lift the Dome: "She took pity," Julia says, "but she wasn't sorry." The shame wasn't enough to bridge the gap of species and create empathy, but it is enough to evoke pity and a sort of mercy.

There are more implications in the novel's exploration of such emotions as pity, empathy, and remorse, but the one I found most striking was how the reader becomes implicated by the narrative. The people who get their news of the Dome from CNN are observers, just as the aliens are observers, just as we are observers. We take pity and are not sorry, because this is our entertainment. There's a Hitchcockian element to it all -- reading the book, we share some qualities with the aliens who have set the Dome down on the town of Chester's Mill. The Dome is there in the narrative for our entertainment. The characters suffer

Odd and the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Brett Helquist, HarperCollins, $14.99, ages 9-12, 128 pages. Twelve-year-old Odd finds the courage to take on an evil giant who's turned mythical gods into animals after losing his father on a Viking expedition and crushing his leg under a tree in this exciting Nordic adventure novella, Gaiman's contribution to the 2008 World Book Day. (View a trailer below!)

The Lost Conspiracy, by Frances Hardinge, HarperCollins Publishers, $16.99, ages 10 and up, 568 pages. When a tribe of shunned Lace people try to fool an inspector into believing Arilou is the next Lady Lost (a venerated woman who can detach her senses from her body), their ruse goes terribly wrong and only sister Haithin can unravel the sinister plot that threatens their enchanted island in this exquisitely written epic.

A Season of Gifts, by Richard Peck, Dial Books for Young Readers, $16.99, ages 9-12, 176 pages. Struggling to fit in and scratch out a living in their new town, a Methodist minister and his family find an unexpected ally in their eccentric, gun-toting neighbor Grandma Dowdel, in this hilarious, heart-warming companion to the Newbery Medal-winning A Year Down Under and Newbery Honor-winning A Long Way to Chicago.

The Magician's Nephew, by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Yoko Tanaka, Candlewick Press, $16.99, ages 9-12, 201 pages. A 10-year-old orphan named Peter is told by a fortuneteller that he must follow an elephant to find his long-lost sister Adelle in this luminous story about believing in the impossible by the author of the Newbery Award-winning The Tale of Despereaux.

The Extra-Ordinary Princess, by Carolyn Q. Ebbitt, Bloomsbury Children's Books, $16.99, ages 9-12, 336 pages. After a plague kills the king and queen of Gossling, their youngest daughter Amelia must rescue her three older sisters from an evil spell and fulfill the prophesies of her people before an evil uncle destroys the kingdom in this fairy tale adventure by debut author Ebbitt.

Flawed Dogs, The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster, Philomel Books, written and illustrated by Berkeley Breathed, $16.99, ages 8-12, 240 pages. A show dog falls from grace after he's framed by a vindictive poodle for taking away a baby, then rallies his adorably odd friends from the pound to exact revenge, only to realize that all he really wants is to win over his human again in this heart-warming, hilarious first novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Breathed.

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