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From the May/June 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine:
Cynthia Ritter asks A Bus Called Heaven author/illustrator Bob Graham about the idea behind his new picture book. Read the full review of A Bus Called Heaven here.
Cynthia Ritter: Was your inspiration for the book a real bus?
Bob Graham: I did see such a bus parked in the street, and I learned our granddaughter Rosie had looked inside.
I said, “What did you see, Rose?” A girl of few words, she replied, “Candles.” It was not the vehicle’s contents that inspired my first scribbling, it was the image of a child on tiptoe peering into the windows of an old bus with a package-taped sign reading “Heaven.”
A Confusion of Princes
by Garth Nix
Middle School, High School Harper/HarperCollins 337 pp.
5/12 978-0-06-009694-6 $17.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-009695-3 $18.89 g
Nix’s gaming-inspired, sci-fi fantasy is a pleasing mix of high-adventure space drama, total bunkum (e.g., “it’s functioning on the tertiary backup level, without a holo…”), and wry, boyish charm. Khemri’s coming-of-age story begins with his emergence from years of genetic and technical “remaking” to take up his title of Prince. But he’s only one of millions of Princes in the Empire, and immediately finds that Princely life isn’t the easy, glamorous ride he’d imagined. Instead he has to join the Navy, suffer manifold humiliations, and, if he wants to live, heed his personal Master of Assassins. But Khemri’s telepathic intelligence is above average, and eventually he moves into a new sort of training that involves him becoming an almost normal human. That experience and his native intelligence cause him to reinterpret everything he’s been taught about the Empire. Nix’s fantasy has enough gadgets, escapes, battles, duels, deaths, and near-death experiences to keep die-hard adventure story readers enthralled. Happily, Khemri is also a thoughtful, winsome, and somewhat complex character, and his cheerfully self-deprecating tone and unpredictable choices make this romp entertaining on multiple levels.
From the May/June 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Roger asks Code Name Verity author Elizabeth Wein about writing books and flying airplanes. Read the full review of Code Name Verity here.
Roger Sutton: You’re a pilot—what has flying taught you about writing?
Elizabeth Wein: As a student pilot, the lengthy “outside aircraft checks” and “cockpit checks” before takeoff used to drive me crazy. I was just anxious to be in the air. Then one morning I made a conscious readjustment of my brain to acknowledge that these things were part of the process. You have to get the groundwork done so that you are free to concentrate on the most important task, which is to fly the plane.
In the air, you check every fifteen minutes that you have sufficient fuel, that your engine is operating efficiently, and that your radio and altitude and heading instruments are all set correctly. Only then can you marvel at the snow-capped Scottish Highlands with the low winter sun gilding them pink and gold.
In writing, the groundwork consists of background reading, fact-checking, drawing up timelines and outlines, taking in suggestions and criticism, and finally the long chore of actually putting all this together and writing the book. Flying has taught me to embrace the entire process. Fly the plane—write the book.
By:
Roger Sutton,
on 5/1/2012
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Like you (I’m guessing), I felt my soul give a little lurch at the news that Encyclopaedia Britannica was getting out of the book business to go online, all the time. Part of my reaction was nostalgia—when I was a child we owned the first four or five volumes of some encyclopedia that my parents had picked up as a supermarket premium, and I would browse them endlessly. As any devotee of the Guinness World Records or the Farmers’ Almanac can tell you, it’s fun to pinball around within the structure a reference book gives you: it has rules so you don’t have to.
But as a librarian, I understand that digital reference sources, done right, have it all over print. The online Britannica is no less authoritative, arguably more so because it is more quickly updated than print. It’s still browsable and inspiring of serendipity: having secured a trial subscription for the purposes of writing this editorial, I’m having trouble keeping myself on task. Wikipedia without shame! Less expensive (given you have the means to access it, which is a big given) than print and more compact—what’s not to like?
Here is the question for children’s book people, though. Does the thought of a kid whizzing his or her way around an electronic reference source give us as much satisfaction as the picture of a kid doing the same thing with a printed book? I thought not. Whether librarian, teacher, publisher, or writer, when we say that at least part of our shared goal is to promote the “love of reading,” what we have always meant is the “love of books.” (Some books.) What will our goal be once books no longer provide our common core?
This is partially a question about e-books. Yes, e-books are books, and libraries want to buy them and enthusiastically promote their circulation to library patrons, who demonstrably want to read them. But publishers complain that they need “friction” to ensure that library borrowing doesn’t take too much of a bite from consumer purchases, and libraries are put into the position of licensing rather than acquiring e-books, just another borrower in the chain. However, this economic tussle is only an early warning sign of the real problem that librarians and (as Stephen Roxburgh argued in the March/April 2012 Horn Book) publishers face: thanks to the leveling power of the internet, electronic literature doesn’t need either one of us, at least as we currently understand our respective missions.
But this is also a question about the independence of readers. In libraries, even those kids who wouldn’t talk to a librarian if their lives depended on it rely far more than they know on the professional expertise provided by the library’s staff, systems, and policies. Readers’ advisory is found as much in the shelving as it is in a friendly chat. When we are reading online, however, we are far more on our own, for good (we can read what we want when we want it) or ill (finding what we want to read can be an adventure beset by false leads, commercial interests, and invasions of privacy).
What can children’s book people become? I reveal my fantasy of what we could make of the future on page 16 of this issue, but in reality what we need to do is to redefine our gatekeeping role. Along with giving up any notion that the only real reading is book reading, like the online Britannica we have to believe in our own expertise and convince others that our knowledge is worth attending to. We’ve spent more than a century dedicated to the idea that some reading is better than other reading, an elitist position we can defend by pointing to decades of excellence in books for youth. Publishers and librarians together, we made that happen. Let us continue to do so.
By:
Roger Sutton,
on 5/1/2012
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When I was a child, growing up in the various parts of India to which my father’s job took us, books were my friends, and I liked them funny. I discovered my grandfather’s P. G. Wodehouse collection at the age of eleven and was at once enchanted by the amiable lunacy of fictional worlds like the Drones Club and Blandings Castle. Lovable and ludicrous, they allowed me to claim an understanding of characters very different from me. I was at that age when laughter comes easily and convoluted story lines feel newly accessible. Plum’s immortal farces were a gift.
But funny isn’t something we’re taught to respect. That could be why, when writers embark on the serious business of crossing cultural boundaries in their work, they don’t often start out with humor. In 2004, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith spoke at the Reading the World conference about the dearth of funny books with cultural resonance. Why, they asked, are multicultural books so very serious?
It was a valid question then. What’s surprising is the degree to which it remains valid today, especially in books for middle-grade readers. Books set in foreign countries are still largely about oppression, while those in hyphenated-American communities are about the challenges of finding oneself and becoming American. While many have humorous moments, they are not, by and large, funny books.
It seems especially necessary that children’s books, in the balance, convey more than a one-dimensional image of “the other,” yet the identity tale of oppressed people continues to dominate those books dubbed “multicultural.” Perhaps the problem is that the very notion of a culturally grounded story is perceived as worthy and important, not concepts we associate with laughter. But the truth is that you can’t see people as fully human if all you can feel for them is pity. Funny books with cultural contexts are capable of subverting and questioning issues of identity and belonging. By upsetting worthy apple carts, they offer new and necessary views of characters with cultural connections beyond the mainstream.
The pioneer in mixing humor with matters of race, culture, and, yes, oppression is undoubtedly Christopher Paul Curtis. The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 was published in 1995. The scene in which Byron’s lips get stuck to the family car’s side-view mirror is the one most readers call to mind, but there are others, many of them much more pointed than that one, as when the boys are faced with the prospect of going to the bathroom in the woods. Byron says, sardonically, “Snakes? I ain’t scared of no damn snake, it’s the people I’m worried about.” He means white people, of course, on the family’s journey south. The humor slams the reader with the grimness of the circumstances, even while it gives the characters a means of coping.
Humor in The Watsons is a mechanism Curtis uses to lead readers to an understanding of the insidiousness of racism and discrimination. It allows us to align clearly with one group of people and against another, in a deliberate stance that counters the prejudices of the period. If you’re with Kenny and his family, you can’t condone the racism they have to endure. Inequity, discrimination, and injustice give thematic impetus to the characters’ journeys. Because we can laugh, we can bear to navigate those obstacles along with them.
Since 1995, other writers of multicultural books have ventured into humorous terrain. In Julia Alvarez’s How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay, the unorthodox use of a strikeout in the title places a tongue-in-cheek tonal stamp on the work before the reader has turned a single page. It’s plain that this relative is about to change young Miguel’s life forever. He can’t hold out against this woman who is practically a force of nature, and neither can the reader. Her character, larger than life and twice as real, creates a playfulness that runs through the book and it
By:
Roger Sutton,
on 4/20/2012
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Just to get a sense of historical perspective, when I last spoke at this festival, there was no euro, no iPods, no Wikipedia, no Facebook; Pluto was still a planet; and I was still drinking. More to the point—today’s point—is that Harry Potter had yet to appear on our side of the pond. That would happen in the fall of 1998.
Harry Potter revealed a lot about children’s reading and changed how children’s books were published. I’d like to examine just how the world of books for children and young adults has changed since the last time I was here.
People throw around plenty of notions about what kids like to read. Or if kids like to read. Boys won’t read about girls, for example, a maxim of our profession to which British publisher Bloomsbury kowtowed (as did Viking almost fifty years ago with The Outsiders) by persuading Joanne Rowling to forgo the use of her first name on the cover, substituting her first initial and that of a pretended middle name. (She didn’t have one, so she took the initial of her grandmother Kathleen.) Would it have made a difference if the author of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—more about that title in a minute—had been known from the start as Joanne Rowling, a lady? I propose that the biggest difference, if there was one, would be that adults would be the ones automatically thinking “girl book” and thus tailoring their recommendation of the book with that in mind.
And Harry Potter turned another piece of conventional wisdom on its head—that kids don’t like to read long books. Or books that have hard words like philosopher in the title, which had prompted Scholastic’s change to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Oh, do let’s keep going: kids don’t like hardcovers, kids don’t like books set in foreign countries, and to combine the two, kids won’t spend their own money on hardcover books set in foreign countries. Now let’s subtract. Take away the foreign countries; kids won’t spend their own money on hardcover books. Take away the hardcover; kids won’t spend their own money on books unless they are popular paperbacks.
And let’s take away the question of money altogether to reveal the conventional wisdom that unfortunately provides the basis of much of our work as teachers and librarians: kids don’t like to read. Kids must be forced to read, tricked into reading, bargained into reading. Like the terms disgruntled employee and scantily clad, reluctant reader is a compound cliché, one that slips far too easily from our professional tongues.
I could go on a long rant about this but will instead just give you a few points to consider:
Point one: Reluctant to read what? If you put down that novel and look around, you will see that lots of so-called reluctant readers are reading plenty; they just aren’t reading fiction, which in this age constitutes “real reading” as defined by “real readers”—mainly teachers and librarians. It wasn’t always thus; think of the first book to win the Newbery Medal, Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind.
Point two: If reluctance to read is considered the default, how do we feel about kids who already like to read? Do they get less attention by virtue of the fact that they don’t seem to need us as much? They do need us; in fact they are us, so let’s give them more respect.
Point three: Car commercials aren’t there to convince us to take up driving. Why do so many books, especially for younger children, belabor the point that reading is fun? A good book should be its own argument.
Let’s look at some more arithmetic, brought to you courtesy of The Horn Book Guide
The sight of a ‘children’s room’ in a public library just after school hours is enchanting…they pour into its doors, the crowd of children, well-dressed, poorly clad, boys, girls, big, small, all with an assured air of welcome, comfortably, easily, happily at home among bookshelves as they are in no other spot. Thirty years ago nobody would have dreamed of such a golden picture as a possibility.
So wrote the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Children’s Library Yearbook Number One, a 1929 volume reviewing what might have been called, in the idiom of the time, three decades of progress.
But specialized work with children in the burgeoning public libraries was well underway before 1899. It didn’t spread from the storied cities of the Northeast, with their intellectual eminence; it arose almost simultaneously in many scattered locales. None were more representative of the children’s library movement, however, than Cleveland and Pittsburgh—cities of the industrial heartland with large immigrant populations and, crucially, a succession of gifted, forceful librarians who met a prevailing need in a historic partnership.
William Howard Brett was an accidental librarian. Born in 1846, he repeatedly tried to enlist in the Union Army—once putting a slip of paper in his shoe inscribed with the number 18, so he could honestly say he was “over eighteen”—until, in the last year of the war, he passed muster as a drummer boy. After the war his attempt to go to college foundered for lack of funds. But he was an avid, discerning reader and made his mark selling books—first in his native Warren, Ohio, then at the big Cleveland bookstore Cobb & Andrews. When the post of city librarian became vacant in 1884, who better qualified?
The Cleveland Public Library—originally the Public School Library—was then housed on the second and third floors of Board of Education headquarters. In the circulation department, borrowers waited at a high counter for an attendant to fetch the requested books. No one under fourteen could get a card.
As a bookseller, Brett knew two big things that the cloistered librarian didn’t: the value of browsing among books and the importance of books to children. He brightened up the quarters, and made them comfortable; he cataloged the collection by the new Dewey system. And with added space, a few years later, he arranged the nonfiction in alcoves by subject and allowed readers to go to the bookcases. In a large city library, where the borrowers were strangers to the staff, open shelves were a daring innovation.
Brett had audacity. A year after taking office, he submitted an article to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, called “Books for Youth,” soliciting a donation of $5,000 (about $125,000 today) to build up a collection of reputable children’s books. Youngsters shouldn’t be reading “worthless and corrupt literature,” he wrote, because the library didn’t have enough copies of Louisa May Alcott titles to meet the demand. No concerned citizen responded, but the article was reprinted in Library Journal, with an editorial salvo, and launched Brett as a children’s library advocate. In later years, Anne Carroll Moore was reputed to have called Brett “the first great children’s librarian.” The quote may be apocryphal, but the tribute rang true, and stuck.
Brett’s polemic against trash also expressed a common sentiment. In those days, you didn’t have to be stodgy to look askance at Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore or Horatio Alger’s heroes. What enlightened grownup didn’t?
The Cleveland Library was then, like many others, serving children through the schools. But the popularity of the school collections only demonstrated to Brett “the pressing need of a system of branch libraries and delivery stations in a city so widely extended as our own.” In 1892, the library opened the first of four branches in existing buildings; fro
- Roger Sutton’s “What Hath Harry Wrought?” examines children’s publishing, post-Harry Potter.
- Uma Krishnaswami calls for more humor in multicultural children’s literature.
- Barbara Bader on the birth of children’s librarianship in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
- Jane Yolen’s original poems capture the essence of classic children’s book authors.
- Rebecca Donnelly muses on what lights up children’s literature.
- Sight Reading: Leonard S. Marcus on color in picture books.
- Books in the Home: Equal reading for girls and boys.
- April Spisak answers the question: “What Makes a Good YA Dystopian Novel?”
- Cadenza: Elissa Gershowitz and Leo Landry imagine “If Babies Ran The Horn Book.”
- Original cover art by former Horn Book design intern/freelancer José Luis Olivares.
The following books will receive starred reviews in the May/June issue of the Horn Book Magazine:
Animal Masquerade; by Marianne Dubuc; trans. from the French by Yvette Ghione (Kids Can)
Demolition; by Sally Sutton; illus. by Brian Lovelock (Candlewick)
The Drowned Cities; by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
Dying to Know You; by Aidan Chambers (Amulet/Abrams)
A Confusion of Princes; by Garth Nix (Harper/HarperCollins)
Code Name Verity; by Elizabeth Wein (Hyperion)
Forget-Me-Nots:Poems to Learn by Heart; selected by Mary Ann Hoberman; illus. by Michael Emberley (Tingley/Little, Brown)
The President’s Stuck in the Bathtub: Poems about the Presidents; by Susan Katz; illus. by Robert Neubecker (Clarion)
A Black Hole Is NOT a Hole; by Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano; illus. by Michael Carroll (Charlesbridge)