new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: laura amy schlitz, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 23 of 23
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: laura amy schlitz in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending Dec. 06, 2015–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.
(Debuted at #10 in Young Adult) The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz: “Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself—because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl could only dream of—a woman with a future.” (Sept. 2015)
(Debuted at #11 in Paperback Fiction) Descent by Tim Johnston: “The Rocky Mountains have cast their spell over the Courtlands, a young family from the plains taking a last summer vacation before their daughter begins college. For eighteen-year-old Caitlin, the mountains loom as the ultimate test of her runner’s heart, while her parents hope that so much beauty, so much grandeur, will somehow repair a damaged marriage. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as terrifying as they are majestic, as suddenly this family find themselves living the kind of nightmare they’ve only read about in headlines or seen on TV.” (Dec. 2015)
(Debuted at #15 in Children’s Illustrated) How to Catch Santa written by Jean Reagan and illustrated by Lee Wildish: “Two sibling narrators give clever tips for ‘catching’ Santa (be crafty! be clever! be gentle!) on Christmas Eve. Filled with humor and holiday warmth, this is a jolly read-aloud for the whole family to enjoy!” (Oct. 2015)
By:
Bianca Schulze,
on 12/1/2015
Blog:
The Children's Book Review
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Trudy Ludwig,
Tanya Simon,
Melanie Crowder,
Lesléa Newman,
Holiday Gift Guide Kids Books,
Harry N. Abrams Books,
Richard Simon,
White Cloud Press,
Becky Albertalli,
Laura Amy Schlitz,
Chanukah,
Jewish Books,
featured,
Monica Brown,
Roaring Brook Press,
Hanukkah,
Little Brown Books for Young Readers,
Mark Siegel,
Philomel Books,
Craig Orback,
Susan Gal,
Ages 4-8,
Ages 9-12,
Book Lists,
Gift Books,
Candlewick,
Balzer + Bray,
Barry Deutsch,
Seasonal: Holiday Books,
Amy June Bates,
Teens: Young Adults,
Cultural Wisdom,
Best Kids Stories,
Add a tag
This list of “9 Excellent Jewish Kids Books for Hanukkah Gifts and Beyond” was curated by Bianca Schulze.
As most people in children's literature know, Laura Amy Schlitz's book, The Hired Girl, has been the focus of a great deal of discussion over the last two weeks. That discussion is primarily centered on her use of "civilized" to describe Indians, and, her depictions of Jews. The point of view in The Hired Girl is a 14 year old girl who is Roman Catholic. Her name is Joan.
Today, I am taking a look at a passage in The Hired Girl that has bearing on heated discussions of late about diversity and "who can write." Meg Rosoff's comments on Edith Campbell's Facebook page and Michael Grant's post are two recent examples of the discussions, and I think Schlitz, through her character, is chiming in, too, in the later part of her book.
David, a Jewish character in The Hired Girl, has his heart set on being a portrait painter. He doesn't want to take up a position in his father's department store. He wants to study painting in Paris. He is working on a painting of Joan of Arc, for a French woman named Madame Marechaux. A devout Catholic, Madame Marechaux wants to see Joan of Arc made into a saint and wants to hang a large painting of her at the top of her stairs in her house on Fifth Avenue in New York City. If his painting is chosen, David thinks it will help him in his dream of being a painter. He asks Joan to sit for him because he thinks her physique and her face, are like that of Joan of Arc.
Well, Madame Marechaux does not choose his painting. She chose the painting done by a French painter named LeClerq. David tells Joan (Kindle Locations 4253-4259):
“The wretched woman chose LeClerq! LeClerq, can you imagine? Of course you don’t know LeClerq, but he’s an idiot! He can’t draw, his perspective’s faulty; he couldn’t foreshorten if his life depended on it. All he does is slather on a lot of greasy impasto with a palette knife — it’s sickening; the man’s a fake, but he’s French, which makes him a god to Madame Marechaux, and he’s not a Jew —”
“The way he carries on about religion, you’d think he was Beato Angelico. Oily little highlights everywhere; it’s enough to make you sick. Madame Marechaux said his sketches were imbued with the deepest piety. Can you imagine saying that — imbued with the deepest piety? Did you ever hear anything so pretentious in your life?”
In the first paragraph, note how LeClerq's abilities are denigrated. In the second one, his speech about his religion (Roman Catholic) is also denigrated--especially in how it informs his art. David continues (Kindle Locations 4265-4268):
She says that I’m bound to be at a disadvantage with Joan of Arc because I’m not a Roman Catholic. What does she know about it? When I’m painting, my religion is painting! I could paint Mahomet flying into the sky on a peacock, or a jackass, or whatever the hell it was. I could feel it, I swear I’d feel it, I’d be imbued with the deepest piety —”
Two things come to mind. Muslims do not depict Muhammed. People depict him anyway, and use free speech as a defense of their decisions to depict him. What is being communicated to readers through David's words?
Is Schlitz--through her characters--pushing against the growing call for diversity of authors? I think so, and, I think it is an overt move on the part of Schlitz, her editor, and her publishing house.
What do you think?
On October 2, 2015, I posted a short note about one passage in Laura Amy Schlitz's The Hired Girl. Schlitz's book is one of the books the Heavy Medal blog is discussing. That blog, for those who don't know, is at the School Library Journal website, and is where Nina Lindsay and Jonathan Hunt host discussions of books that may be in contention for the prestigious Newbery Medal. Books that win that award are purchased by school and public libraries across the country. Because books that win the Newbery carry such prestige, teachers assign them to students.
When he introduced the book on October 15, Jonathan Hunt linked to American Indians in Children's Literature and summarized my comments about The Hired Girl.
I appreciate that Jonathan Hunt brought my concerns to readers of Heavy Medal, but he also dismissed them as minor and said that The Hired Girl is among his top three books for this year. I've been active in the discussion and have read and re-read the book as I participate. The discussion has has spread over three distinct pages at School Library Journal, and over at Book Riot, too. The Jewish aspects of the book figure prominently in those discussions.
With this blog post, I'm bringing my thoughts into a single place for anyone interested in focusing on a Native perspective on The Hired Girl. Just below this paragraph is my "For the TL/DR crowd" which means 'too long/didn't read, but here's the key points.' Beneath it is my in-depth look at the book.
~~~~~
The Hired Girl
from a Native Perspective
For the TL/DR crowd
(1)
Mascots and Halloween costumes are evidence that
adults, much less children, do not have the
background information needed to see Joan's
thinking is wrongheadded when she talks about
"civilized" Indians or when she invites Oskar to play Indian.
(2)
Discussing pejorative terms used in the Author's Note,
but not including "natives" in that discussion
suggests Schlitz herself may not understand that her
depictions of Native people in the book is, itself, wrongheadded.
(3)
Praising The Hired Girl and ignoring concerns over
Native content is another, in a too-long line of, instances in
which gatekeepers throw Native people under the bus.
~~~~~
The Hired Girl
from a Native Perspective
An In-Depth Look
Set in 1911,
The Hired Girl is about Joan, a 14 year old Catholic girl who runs away from her father's farm in eastern Pennsylvania. Her mother died a few years prior and Joan's life with her dad and older brothers is, to say the least, devoid of joy. The only source of joy is the teacher who gives her books. Near the end of the first part of the book, the teacher visits Joan. She gives her a bouquet of flowers wrapped in newspaper. Joan takes them in the house and returns outside. The teacher tries to give her some more books but Joan's dad comes upon them and sends the teacher and the books packing.
Back inside the house, Joan reads the newspaper that the flowers were wrapped in.
She reads an article about the Amalgamated Railroad Employees (railroad workers) being on strike and thinks maybe she ought to go on strike, too, so that her dad will give her some money for the work she does. In that same paper, she reads ads looking for "white girl to cook" and "first-class white girl for cooking and housework" and wishes she could be a hired girl. Her efforts to strike fail, her dad burns her books, and she runs away to Baltimore with the idea that she'll find work as a hired girl.
When she gets to Baltimore, the day ends with a near-rape. Joan escapes that, and ends up crying and praying on a park bench. In the midst of her prayer, a man offers to help her. That man is Solomon Rosenbach. His demeanor makes him more trustworthy than the man who tried to rape her. She tells him her story and that she's looking for work. The near-rape makes her wary, but Soloman has a plan that she's ok with, so she follows him to his home. He goes inside and tells his mother about her; Joan waits outside. Mrs. Rosenbach appears, asks her a few questions, and decides Joan--who is now going by Janet--can stay with them a few days if Malka, their Jewish housekeeper, doesn't mind. Feeling safe in their home, Joan decides she'd like to work for the Rosenbach's. She tells Mrs. Rosenbach that "you'll find me very willing" to help out. Here's that part of the story (Kindle Locations 1203-1219):
“Willing to work in a Jewish household?” she said, and when I didn’t answer right away, she added, “You, I think, are not Jewish.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. I was as taken aback as if she’d asked me if I was an Indian. It seemed to me — I mean, it doesn’t now, but it did then — as though Jewish people were like Indians: people from long ago; people in books. I know there still are Indians out West, but they’re civilized now, and wear ordinary clothes. In the same way, I guess I knew there were still Jews, but I never expected to meet any.
Joan is taken aback at the idea that she might be thought of as Jewish, or, Indian because she thought the Jews are like Indians: people from long ago. Joan knows there are Indians now (remember, the story takes place in 1911) and that they are "civilized" and "wear ordinary clothes."
What does Joan think civilized means? Does it mean wearing ordinary clothes like the ones she wears? Does she think wearing those clothes make those Indians civilized?
In the paragraphs immediately following that passage, we learn from Joan that the information she has about Jews is from
Ivanhoe, but we aren't told where Joan got her information about Indians.
Let's see, though, what we might find out if we dig into books for children published during Joan's childhood, which would be 1897 (the year she was born) to the year she ran away, 1911. Maybe she read
Wigwam Stories Told by North American Indians, by Mary Catherine Judd, published in 1901 by Ginn & Company in Boston.
Wigwam Stories is recommended in a lot of publications of that time. It was recommended, for example, in 1902 in the
Journal of Education published by Oxford University Press, in 1906 in
Public Libraries: A Monthly Review of Library Matters and Methods, published by the Library Bureau, in
1910 in
The Model School Library, published by the California Teachers Association, in 1915 in
Books for Boys and Girls: A Selected List, published by the
American Library Association, and in 1922 in
Graded List of Books for Children, published by the National Education Association.
The preface for
Wigwam Stories ends with this note from the author:
See that last sentence in the preface? It says "Careful investigations undertaken by the largest of nonreservation schools, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, prove that 94 per cent of the 4000 students recorded there have never "returned to the blanket," but have become modern home makers."
Maybe
Wigwam Stories is the source of Joan's information. Maybe she read it and asked her teacher for more information, and her teacher told her about Carlisle Indian Industrial School. That teacher is sympathetic to the conditions miners work in, so maybe she's also aware of the goings-on at Carlisle. Maybe she's even seen the before and after photographs taken of students--photographs meant to persuade people that the school was changing the children so that they would not, as the note says, "return to the blanket." Here's one of those photos:
Is that what Joan has in mind? Jonathan (at Heavy Medal) is arguing that when Joan thinks "they’re civilized now, and wear ordinary clothes," she is telling us that other people think in stereotypical ways, but she does not. He would have us think that she's more knowledgeable than other people of that time, but later, she invites Oskar to play Indian. At that part of the book, Joan and Malka are taking care of Mrs. Rosenbach's grandchildren. One is a little boy named Oskar. Malka wants him to nap, but he doesn't want to (Kindle Locations 3888-3900):
Malka looked at me with desperation in her eyes, and I rose to the occasion. I remembered how Luke and I used to play on the days when Ma aired her quilts. “I’ll take Oskar up to my room. We’ll make a blanket tent and play Indians. He’ll like that, won’t you, Oskar?”
Oskar looked intrigued, so I led him upstairs. I rigged a tent by draping the bedclothes over the foot of my bed and the top of the dresser. We crawled inside the tent, and I told Oskar there was a blizzard outside (we made blizzard noises) with wild wolves howling (we howled). Then I was inspired to say that we were starving to death inside our tent, and that we would die if no Indian was brave enough to go out and hunt buffalo. Oskar took the bait. “I’ll go,” he said, and squared his shoulders. “I’ll go kill the buffalo.”
“I’ll make you a horse,” I offered. To tell the truth, I was starting to enjoy myself. I tore strips from my old sage-green dress to make a bridle, and I tied them to the back of a chair. Oskar rode up and down the prairie, rocking the chair back and forth and flapping the reins.
Then he demanded a buffalo. I produced my cardboard suitcase, which he beat to death with his bare hands. He dragged the slain buffalo back to the tent, and we pretended to gnaw on buffalo meat. “You’re good at playing,” Oskar said earnestly.
I felt terribly pleased. But of course, one buffalo was not enough; he had to hunt another one. Then we killed a few wolves. After the last wolf was dead, he collapsed in the tent beside me.
With that passage, we get more insight into what Joan knows about Indians. If Jonathan is correct, doesn't it seem that she would not teach that stereotypical play to Oskar? Jonathan and others who are defending this book insist that Joan's mistaken ideas are corrected along the way. Where is the correction to playing Indian? I don't see it.
Near the end of the book, Joan and David (another of Mrs. Rosenbach's sons) kiss and she falls in love with him. He is not in love with her. She thinks about him all the time and at this part, wonders how people can stand to be apart (Kindle Locations 4099-4101):
I think about the conquistadors and how they left off kissing their wives and went sailing across the ocean to conquer a lot of innocent natives who would probably have preferred to stay in their hammocks and kiss their wives.
There's a lot to say about that sentence, but I want to focus on "natives." Look it up in your favorite dictionary. You'll see it is considered dated and offensive. The
Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary gives an example "Raleigh wanted the cooperation of the natives and treated the Indians with respect." Now--I believe that Joan would use that word. The problem is that it is not addressed in the story, and it is not addressed in the Author's Note either. In it, Laura Amy Schlitz's wrote: (Kindle Locations 4992-4999):
In The Hired Girl, I have tried to be historically accurate about language. This has led me to use terms that are considered pejorative today, such as Hebrew, Mahomet, and Mahometans.
I used Mahomet and Mahometan for two reasons. The word Muslim, which is now preferred, was not in use until much later in the twentieth century. And, as a reader of Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, and The Picturesque World, Joan would have encountered the words Mahomet and Mahometan. These are the words that were used at that time.
Similarly, many Jewish people today find the term Hebrew offensive, but the fact that many Jewish organizations in Baltimore used it (the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, the Hebrew Literary Society, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, etc.) suggests that at the turn of the century, the word Hebrew was used with pride.
Why didn't she address her use of "natives" in the note?
Those who praise The Hired Girl are saying that it is clear to readers that Joan is naive and has mistaken ideas about a lot of things. They think we should trust the child reader to know that Joan is naive.
People who say that we should trust the child reader must not interact much, if at all, with Native people. Do they not know that Native people across the country are sharing blog posts, videos, and posters, asking that people not dress up like Indians for Halloween? Do they not know that Native people are showing up, week after week, to protest the use of Native imagery for mascots, from elementary schools to professional athletic teams? Do they not know that Native parents are at schools again and again to ask teachers not to use books that dehumanize us, or to ask that schools not do things like the Land Run and Thanksgiving Dinners?
Who is planning all those insensitive activities? Adults. Adults who ought to be able to read such activities critically. They can't. Or won't. Either way, the outcome is the same. And those who praise The Hired Girl think children are capable of reading critically when, all around us, there is evidence that adults can not, or will not read critically about things that are, on their face, problematic?
Predictably, another defense of The Hired Girl is that the main character is Roman Catholic. "Not enough books about Roman Catholics!" they say. "We cannot let those problematic Indian parts knock this book out of contention for the Newbery!" Come January, we'll know what the Newbery Committee decides. Will The Hired Girl be yet another book in a long list of books that does something so well that the committee decides it has to overlook the problematic Native content? I hope not.
I don’t usually post anything aside from videos on Sunday but after attending the IBBY Conference in NYC this past weekend this topic came up and seemed well worth pursuing.
Not long ago I reviewed The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz. It’s a fine, unique historical novel about a 14-year-old girl who escapes a grim farm existence by running away to Baltimore to work as a hired girl. She’s the product of a cruel father who denies her any schooling leaving her little comfort except that which comes to her from books.
Recently this particular title has been the focus of a great deal of discussion over at Heavy Medals due to its mention of American Indians. Much to my surprise, people are commenting on the book’s merits due to a passage in which Joan thinks the following:
“It seemed to me–I mean, it doesn’t now, but it did then–as though Jewish people were like Indians: people from long ago; people in books. I know there are Indians out West, but they’re civilized now, and wear ordinary clothes. In the same way, I guess I knew there were still Jews, but I never expected to meet any.”
Folks appear to be mighty perturbed over this section of the story. It made me think a lot about what we demand of our historical protagonists in our contemporary children’s novels. Take Joan. Her education is that of a white working class girl in early 20th century America. She has a very limited world view and knows about Jewish people solely though the context of Ivanhoe. Now we look at that statement she thought. Considering white attitudes of the time, is it believable that Joan would think this of American Indians? Quite frankly, considering her schooling I found it, if anything, a little difficult to believe that her attitude wasn’t worse.
But let us not talk about being accurate to the attitudes of someone in Joan’s time and place and consider instead whether or not Ms. Schlitz should have included the passage at all. Is it harmful to her young readership to encounter a sympathetic protagonist with these opinions? Might they think them legitimate feelings? Might they not pick something up from such statements?
First, I’d like to address the question of whether or not children, or in this case middle school students, are capable of decoding an ignorant character’s prejudices if that prejudice is not specifically called out. Joan is wrong about a lot of things. You see this and you know this pretty early on. And while it is entirely possible that there will be young readers out there who have never encountered positive images and portrayals of American Indians in their children’s literature, the notion of white people “civilizing” other races and nations is not unique here. Do kids walk into historical novels with the understanding that people in the past thought things we cannot or should not think today? Is it the responsibility of the author instead to cut their all their sympathetic historical figures from a contemporary cloth and imbue them with our own attitudes towards race, gender, sexuality, etc.? I am reminded of a moment in Red Moon at Sharpsburg when author Rosemary Wells had her Southern Civil War era protagonist say of her corset that, “It constricts the mind.” A statement made by a young woman without outside influence or context, I might add. It felt wrong because it was wrong. A broad attempt to shoehorn contemporary attitudes into a historical tale.
But going back a bit, let’s again try to answer the question of why it was necessary for Ms. Schlitz to include this passage at all. It would have been easy to keep out. And Schlitz is not a writer who dashes off her prose without thought or consideration. So what is the value of its inclusion?
Does it come right out? It does! In fact, when you have a protagonist capable of awkward beliefs that are of their time, it would make so much sense to just not mention any of them, right? To do otherwise would be to offer a layer of complexity to an otherwise good character. Are books for young people capable of that complexity?
Let’s say the passage removed. Let’s say all passages of American Indians were removed (there’s more than one, you know). Let’s say mentions of American Indians were removed from all books for children written about this time period but only when those mentions were prejudiced. Let’s say all American Indians themselves were removed as well. See? Isn’t it so much easier to write historical fiction when you don’t have controversial topics to trip you up?
I am reminded of the lesson of Patricia C. Wrede’s Thirteenth Child. Do you remember this controversy from 2009? It came up in the pre-Twitter era (it was around but not what it constitutes today) when outrage had a less constructive echo chamber in place, so you’d be forgiven for having forgotten it. The novel takes place in a historical America where magic is common and the Land Bridge never occurred. This America has woolly mammoths and slaves but no American Indians. In a conversation online in 2006, long before the book’s publication, the author said this about her title:
The current plan is to have the primary difference before 1492 be that the various pre-historic attempts to colonize the Americas were unsuccessful; thus, no Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Mississippi Valley civilization, or Native Americans of any sort…. The absence of an indiginous population in the Americas is obviously going to have a significant impact on the way things develop during the exploration and colonization period, and I’m still feeling my way through how I’m going to finagle that to get to where I want.
Which is, basically: A North America in which the threat of Indians was replaced by the threat of un-extinct megafauna…
Dubbed “MammothFail”, people were incensed that an entire ethnic group could be done away with because they were (their words) inconvenient to the plot. It was the first time I saw an angry internet pile-on (the like of which we’re almost accustomed to these days) and it shocked me. At the same time, the anger was understandable.
So what did we learn? Excluding someone doesn’t mean you’re doing them some kind of a service.
If Joan’s thoughts about Indians are prejudiced or nasty is she no longer worth rooting for because we’ve seen another side to her? Or will the child reader recognize ignorance when they see it? Joan is ignorant about so many things in the world. This is just one of them.
I think a lot of this comes down to the degree to which we trust child readers. I don’t think for one second that Ms. Schlitz shares Joan’s opinions of American Indians and what it means to be “civilized”. What I do think is that she works as a school librarian and sees children every day. I think that over the years she has learned from them and seen the degree to which they are capable of catching on to the subtlety of a book. I think she knows that this passage reflects more about Joan than it does about American Indians of the time and she believes kids will recognize that too. The question I’m interested in is whether or not we believe that characters with personal prejudices should be presented to our young readers AT ALL because kids and teens can’t handle that kind of complexity.
In the end, can prejudiced/racist characters be heroes when they appear in books for youth? Or are there subtleties at work here that make this more than just a black and white issue? I like to think we’re capable of trusting our readers, regardless of age. The Hired Girl believes them capable for rejecting Joan’s dated opinions. We should extend to them that same respect.
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 10/5/2015
Blog:
A Fuse #8 Production
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Reviews,
historical fiction,
Laura Amy Schlitz,
Best Books,
Candlewick,
middle school novels,
Best Books of 2015,
Reviews 2015,
2015 reviews,
2015 historical fiction,
Add a tag
The Hired Girl
By Laura Amy Schlitz
Candlewick Press
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0763678180
Ages 12 and up
Bildungsroman. Definition: “A novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education.” A certain strain of English major quivers at the very term. Get enough Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shoved down your gullet and you’d be quivering too. I don’t run across such books very often since I specialize primarily in books for children between the ages of 0-12. For them, the term doesn’t really apply. After all, books for kids are often about the formation of the self as it applies to other people. Harry finds his Hogwarts and Wilbur his spider. Books for teenagers are far better suited to the Bildungsroman format since they explore that transition from child to adult. Yet when you sit right down and think about it, the transition from childhood to teenagerhood is just as fraught. There is a beauty to that age, but it’s enormously hard to write. Only a few authors have ever attempted it and come out winners on the other side. Laura Amy Schlitz is one of the few. Writing a book that could only be written by her, published by the only publisher who would take a chance at it (Candlewick), Schlitz’s latest is pure pleasure on the page. A book for the child that comes up to you and says, “I’ve read Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. What’s new that’s like that?”
The last straw was the burning of her books. Probably. Even if Joan’s father hadn’t set her favorite stories to blazes, it’s possible that she would have run away eventually. What we do know is that after breaking her back working for a father who wouldn’t even let her attend school or speak to her old teacher, 14-year-old Joan Skraggs has had enough. She has the money her mother gave her before she died, hidden away, and a dream in mind. Perhaps if she runs away to Baltimore she might be able to find work as a hired girl. It wouldn’t be too different from what she’s done at home (and it could be considerably less filthy). Bad luck turns to good when Joan’s inability to find a boarding house lands her instead in the household of the Rosenbach family. They’re well-to-do Jewish members of the community and Joan has no experience with Jewish people. Nonetheless she is willing to learn, and learn she does! But when she takes her romantic nature a bit too far with the family, she’ll find her savior in the most unexpected of places.
I mentioned Anne of Green Gables in my opening paragraph, but I want to assure you that I don’t do so lightly. One does not bandy about Montgomery’s magnum opus. To explain precisely why I referenced it, however, I need to talk a little bit about a certain type of romantically inclined girl. She’s the kind that gets most of her knowledge of other people through books. She is by turns adorable and insufferable. Now, the insufferable part is easy to write. We are, by nature, inclined to dislike girls in their early teens that play a kind of mental dress-up that’s cute on kids and unnerving on adolescents. However, this character can be written and written well. Jo in Little Women comes through the age unscathed. Anne from Anne of Green Gables traipses awfully close to the awful side, but manages to charm the reader in the process (no mean feat). The “Girl” from the musical The Fantastiks would fit in this category as well. And finally, there is Joan in The Hired Girl. She vacillates wildly between successfully playing the part of a young woman and then going back to the younger side of adolescence. She pouts over not getting a kitten, for crying out loud. Adults reading this book will have a vastly different experience than kids and teens, then. To a grown-up (particularly a grown-up woman) Joan is almost painfully familiar. We remember the age of fourteen and what that felt like. That yearning for love and adventure. That yearning can be useful to you, but it can also make you bloody insufferable. As such, adults are going to be inclined to forgive Joan very easily. I can only hope that her personality allows younger readers to do the same.
My husband used to write and direct short historical films. They were labor intensive affairs where every car, house, and pot holder had to be accurate and of the period. It would have been vastly easier to just write and direct contemporary fare, but where’s the fun in that? I think of those days often when I read works of historical fiction. Labor intensive doesn’t even begin to explain what goes into an accurate look at history. Ms. Schlitz appears to be unaware of this, however, since not only has she written something set in the past, she throws the extra added difficulty of discussing religion into it as well. Working in a Jewish household at the turn of the century, Joan must come to grips with all kinds of concepts and ideas that she has hitherto been ignorant of. For this to work, the author tries something very tricky indeed. She makes certain that her heroine has grown up on a farm where her sole concept of Jewish people is from “Ivanhoe”, so that she is as innocent as a newborn babe. She isn’t refraining from anti-Semitism because she’s an apocryphal character. She’s just incapable of it due to her upbringing, and that’s a hard element to pull off. Had Ms. Schlitz pushed the early portion of this book any further, she would have possibly disinterested her potential readership right from the start. I have heard a reader say that the opening sequence with Joan’s family is too long, but I personally believe these sections where she wanders blindly in and out of various situations could not have worked if that section had been any shorter.
But as I say, historical fiction can be the devil to get right. Apocryphal elements have a way of seeping into the storyline. Your dialogue has to be believably from the time and yet not so stilted it turns off the reader. In this, Laura Amy Schlitz is master. This book feels very early 20th century. You wouldn’t blink an eye to learn it was fifty or one hundred years old (though its honest treatment of Jewish people is probably the giveaway that it’s contemporary). The language feels distinctive but it doesn’t push the young reader away. Indeed, you’re invited into Joan’s world right from the start. I also enjoyed very much her Catholicism. Characters that practice religion on a regular basis are so rare in contemporary books for kids these days.
As I mentioned, adults will read this book differently than the young readership for whom it is intended. I do think that if I were fourteen myself, this would be the kind of book I’d take to. By the same token, as an adult the theme that jumped out at me the most was that of motherhood. Joan’s mother died years before but she has a very palpable sense of her. Her memories are sharp and through her eyes we see the true tragedy of her mother’s life. How she wed a violent, hateful man because she felt she had no other choice. How she wasn’t cut out for the farm’s hard labor and essentially worked herself to death. How she saw her daughter’s future and found the means to save her (and by golly it works!). All the more reason to have your heart go out to Joan when she tries, time and again, to turn Mrs. Rosenbach into a substitute mother figure. It’s a role that Mrs. Rosenbach does NOT fit into in the least, but that doesn’t stop Joan from extended what is clearly teenaged rebellion onto a woman who isn’t her mother but her employer. Indeed, it’s Mrs. Rosenbach who later says, “I felt her wanting a mother.”
Is it a book for a certain kind of reader? Who am I to say? It’s a book I’d hand to a young me, so I don’t think I can necessarily judge who else would enjoy it. It’s beautiful and original and old and classic. It makes you feel good when you read it. It’s thick but it flies by. Because of the current state of publishing today books are either categorized as for children or for teens. The Hired Girl isn’t really for either. It’s for those kids poised between the two ages, desperate to be older but with bits of pieces of themselves stuck fast to their younger selves. A middle school novel of a time before there were middle schools. Beautifully written, wholly original, one-of-a-kind. Unlike anything you’ve read that’s been published in the last fifty years at least, and that is the highest kind of praise I can give.
On shelves now.
Professional Reviews:
Interviews: Laura speaks with SLJ about the book.
Videos:
More discussions of the book and where it came from!
This is one of those posts people are gonna object to because it is one of the "one liners" -- which means that the book has nothing to do with Native people, but there is a line in it that I am pointing out.
It is "one line" to some, but to Native people or anyone who pays attention to ways that Native people are depicted in children's and young adult literature, those "one lines" add up to a very long list in which we are misrepresented.
Here's the synopsis for Laura Amy Schlitz's The Hired Girl, a 2015 book published by Candlewick (for grades 7 and up):
Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself—because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl could only dream of—a woman with a future. Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz relates Joan’s journey from the muck of the chicken coop to the comforts of a society household in Baltimore (Electricity! Carpet sweepers! Sending out the laundry!), taking readers on an exploration of feminism and housework; religion and literature; love and loyalty; cats, hats, and bunions.
Set in Pennsylvania in 1911,
The Hired Girl has six starred reviews. It is currently listed at Amazon as the #1 bestseller in historical fiction for teens and young adults. Impressive. Hopefully, Schlitz and her editor will revisit the part of the book where a woman tells Joan "You, I think, are not Jewish." Joan responds:
"No, ma'am," I said. I was as taken aback as if she'd asked me if I was an Indian. It seemed to me--I mean, it doesn't now, but it did then--as though Jewish people were like Indians: people from long ago; people in books. I know there are Indians out West, but they're civilized now, and wear ordinary clothes. In the same way, I guess I knew there were still Jews, but I never expected to meet any.
Let's look closely at what Joan said.
The word 'are' in "I know there
are Indians out West..." is in italics. I like that, because I often speak/write of the importance of tense. Most people use past tense when speaking or writing about Native peoples, but we're still here.
But then, Joan thinks "they're civilized now." Does that mean Joan buys into the idea of the primitive Indian who became "civilized" by contact with White people? Do the "ordinary clothes" they wear mean they're civilized?
I'm pretty sure people are going to say that--in asking those two questions--I'm not leaving room for people to do well, or try well, in their writing about Native people.
The fact is, this book is already succeeding and so are ones I've written about before. This post* isn't going to hurt it, but if it does give people (who read AICL) the opportunity to think about words they use in their own writing, that is a plus for all of us.
Native peoples in the U.S. were living in well-ordered societies when Europeans came here. We weren't primitive. Indeed, European heads of state recognized the Native Nations as nations of people. That's why there are treaties. Heads of state, then and now, meet with other heads of state in diplomatic negotiations. Saying "well, Joan didn't know that" is a cop out. She could have known it. Plenty of people did! She's a fictional character. She can know whatever Schlitz wants her to know.
__________
*Replaced "My lone voice" with "This post" in hopes that I'll find other writing that points to this particular passage.
By:
Bianca Schulze,
on 9/3/2015
Blog:
The Children's Book Review
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Young Adult Fiction,
Book Lists,
Chapter Books,
Laura Amy Schlitz,
Scholastic,
Markus Zusak,
Candlewick,
Maggie Stiefvater,
Pat Schmatz,
Patrick Ness,
Kwame Alexander,
Teens: Young Adults,
Best Books for Kids,
Best Kids Stories,
HMH Books for Young Readers,
Best YA,
Alfred A. Knopf Books,
Add a tag
It’s a tough assignment, and the best I can do is choose five YA books that, if I were shipwrecked today, I’d want with me.
"Clara slept. Never in her life had she known so dense a sleep; a sleep without dreaming, without the slightest twitch of finger or eyelid. She was as lifeless as a pressed flower. If she had been awake, she could not have said whether her eyes were open or shut. Her mind was empty, freed from guilt and terror and grief. Only the night before, she had spoken of her fear of cold and darkness; now darkness and cold claimed her, and she was not afraid." Overview: It is November the sixth, in Victorian London, and Clara Wintermute is turning twelve. To her delight, her father has reluctantly consented to hire the mysterious street performer, Professor Grisini and His Venetian Fantoccini, into their home as her party entertainment.Yet when the puppetmaster finally arrives, it is his two orphaned assistants, almost-fourteen-year-old Lizzie Rose and probably-eleven-year-old Parsefall, that Clara is most excited to see. Clara thinks their lives must be grand - free from studies, able to perform marionette shows for people out in the open air. Lizzie Rose and Parsefall think Clara's life must be grand - only child of a wealthy household, indulged by her parents, provided with a fine education. But all three children soon find that all is not as they supposed.
Clara vanishes late that evening, with the dark and secretive Grisini pegged as her probable kidnapper. When Grisini suddenly goes missing not long after, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall fear he does indeed have something to do with Clara's disappearance. And soon, they find themselves on an unexpected and dangerous quest to find her. For Teachers and Librarians:Splendors and Glooms is a book that will both hold your students' interest, and provide you with plenty of ways to incorporate the book into a variety of lessons.It fits nicely into a lesson on literary genres - take your pick of gothic novel, historical fiction, mystery, dark fairy tale, and/or even thriller. And with the magic aspects, vivid dreams, and Lizzie Rose's uncanny sense of smell, you could even argue it touches just a bit if not more so on the edges of paranormal.The book contains two overlapping stories that eventually converge at a crucial point: after discussion, have your students demonstrate their understanding of this graphically, via Venn Diagram.Another idea: the author's favorite writer is Charles Dickens, and the book is often described as Dickensian - which leads nicely into a lesson on characteristics of a Dickensian novel, and identification of those characteristics in this book.During an interview in the Baltimore Sun, the author discusses her interest in Faustian bargains as part of a novel: have your students research and define the term, and then identify the Faustian bargain(s) in this book - who made one, what were the terms, how did things turn out for that character, etc.You could include the book in a unit on Victorian London: compare/contrast life for rich vs poor, discussing how children fared in each; talk about Victorian mourning customs; have your students research diseases and treatments from that era, with a focus on cholera (which touches Clara's family in a heartbreaking way); plan a lesson on types of entertainment enjoyed during that time period, with a mini-unit on marionette shows and puppetry.If you have other lesson ideas, feel free to share them in the comments section below. For Parents, Grandparents and Caregivers:Make sure your kiddos don't have anywhere to be before you hand them Splendors and Glooms, or when it's time to go, you may hear repeated cries of, "Wait! I just have to finish this part first!" It is a book full of mystery, suspense and magic that will keep them wanting to turn pages - but not too quickly. There is much to take in, and they'll want to take their time to make sure they experience it all. Your young readers will feel for the characters as they navigate the well-meaning yet at times very misunderstood bonds of family, as they work to establish and maintain friendships, as they learn to recognize and trust those people in their lives who prove themselves true and genuine, and as they struggle to find their true place in the world. For the Kids:Splendors and Glooms isn't your average, run-of-the-mill book with magic in it. Nope. It has the kind of magic that you have to really pay attention to see. It hides from you, but hints at you. It peeks out from behind the corners, or ducks behind the couch just as you catch a glimpse of it, so that you can't help but chase it around because you just have to know what's going on. At the same time, maybe you're a teensy bit scared to catch up to it - though you'd never admit it - because that magic may or may not be evil. So you read the book. And you keep reading, shivering a little sometimes, peeking through the cracks between the fingers you've clamped over your eyes at other times, and giggling here and there in between, 'cause you just have to know what's going on, and how it all turns out. No matter how long it takes.Clara is a twelve-year-old rich girl living in Victorian London who seems to have it all in the eyes of almost-fourteen-year-old Lizzie Rose and probably-eleven-year-old Parsefall. Lizzie Rose and Parsefall are assistant puppeteers who seem to live a free and easy life in the eyes of Clara. Each longs for the life of the other, for different reasons. But each of them has secrets and griefs and guilt and fears that none of the others know about. Throw in an evil puppetmaster and a doomed and vengeful witch, and you've got the makings of a book that you Will. Not. Put. Down.For Everyone Else:What can I say about Splendors and Glooms that I haven't already said? Probably plenty. But no matter what your age, if what I've said so far isn't enough to entice you to read this thoroughly wonderful novel, maybe the section below is: Wrapping Up:Splendors and Glooms is the type of book a reader wants to linger over. With an abundance of rich description, many twists and turns, suspense, mystery, touches of humor, a goodly dose of good vs evil in many forms, and variety of very real and strong and relatable emotions, to rush the read means to miss far too much. And not to read it at all would just be a terrible shame. So go. Get the book. Then grab a blanket, curl up on the couch, and start reading. Title: Splendors and GloomsAuthor: Laura Amy SchlitzJacket Illustration: Bagram IbatoullinePages: 400Reading Level: Ages 9 and upPublisher and Date: Candlewick Press, 2012Edition: 1st EditionLanguage: EnglishPublished In: United StatesPrice: $17.99ISBN-10: 0763653802ISBN-13: 978-0-7636-5380-4
Laura Amy Schlitz is a true creative soul. She loves to make things (bread, marionettes, quilts, watercolors, and origami animals), and write things (books, plays and stories). She has been by turns and/or simultaneously: a playwright, a storyteller, a costumer, an actress, a children's author, and a children's librarian.Born January 1, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland, Ms Schlitz graduated from Goucher College with a B.A. in aesthetics in 1977. She spent three years in the 1980s as an actress touring with the Baltimore-based Children's Theater Association. She has been since 1991 - and continues to be - a children's librarian at Park School in Baltimore, MD. And all the while, she writes.Ms Schlitz has so far written six books for children, all published by
Candlewick Press. In 2008, she won the Newbery Medal for Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, illustrated by Robert Byrd (2007). Her most recent work is Splendors and Glooms (2012). Her other titles include: Bearskinner: a tale of the Brothers Grimm (2007); Hero Schliemann: the dreamer who dug for Troy (2006); Night Fairy (2010); and A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama (2006).
In addition to her children's books, Ms Schlitz has written children's plays, which have been produced by professional theaters around the USA.
Ms Schlitz, whose favorite author is Charles Dickens, lives in Maryland.Sources:Bios: Laura Amy Schlitz - Candlewick PressLaura Amy Schlitz - freshfiction.comLaura Amy Schlitz - BTSB BookstoreNewbery Winner Laura Amy Schlitz publishes her magnum opus - Baltimore Sun articleQ&A with Laura Amy Schlitz - PW Weekly
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 12/13/2012
Blog:
A Fuse #8 Production
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Uncategorized,
middle grade fiction,
middle grade fantasy,
Laura Amy Schlitz,
Candlewick,
2012 reviews,
Best Books of 2012,
2012 middle grade fiction,
Newbery 2013 contender,
2012 middle grade fantasy,
middle grade gothic,
Add a tag
Splendors and Glooms
By Laura Amy Schlitz
Candlewick Press
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5380-4
Ages 10 and up
On shelves now.
Do you remember that moment in the film version of The Princess Bride where the grandfather is trying to convince his stubborn grandson that the book he’s about to read is fantastic? He lures the kid in by saying the book contains, “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles.” If I had a kid standing in front me right now looking at Splendors and Glooms with equal suspicion I would probably tell them that the book has a witch, an evil puppet master, transformations, a magical amulet, small dogs, orphans, lots of blood, and Yorkshire pudding. And just as the grandfather’s description fails to do The Princess Bride justice, so too does this description just wan and pale in the presence of Laura Amy Schlitz’s latest. This is a book infused with such a heady atmosphere that from page one on you are so thoroughly sucked into the story that the only way to get out is through.
The witch is dying. The girl is lonely. The children are hungry. Four people unconnected until the puppet master Grisini brings them, in a sense, together. Lizzie Rose and Parsefall are orphans who have lived with the man for years, doing his puppet work with him, received almost nothing in return. When they perform for Clara Wintermute, a rich little girl who requests a performance for her birthday, they are unprepared when the next day policeman come around asking questions. Clara has disappeared and Grisini is under suspicion. When Grisini himself disappears, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall find something that makes Clara’s fate seem out of the ordinary. All the more so when they are summoned by a witch to a beautiful distant estate and everyone, even Grisini, is reunited once more for a final showdown.
As odd as it is to say, what this book reminded me of more than anything else was A.S. Byatt’s Angels & Insects. To be fair, I felt that way about Ms. Schlitz’s previous novel A Drowned Maiden’s Hair too. Though written for adults, Byatt’s novel consists of two short stories, one of which concerns séances and a woman with multiple dead children in her past. Thoughts of that woman came to me as I read more about Clara’s story. At first glance a spoiled little rich girl, Clara is cursed in a sense to be the one child that survived a cholera epidemic that wiped out her siblings when she was quite young. Forced to honor them at her birthday (not to mention other times of the year) she is understandably less than in love with their figurative ghosts. Like Byatt, Schlitz taps so successfully into a time period’s mores that even as you wonder at their strangeness you understand their meaning. You may not agree with them, but you understand.
Where A Drowned Maiden’s Hair was a self-described melodrama, Splendors and Glooms is Victorian Gothic. It brings to mind the dirty streets of London and books by authors like Joan Aiken. In Lizzie Rose and Parsefall’s world you can get dirty just by walking through the yellow fog. Never mind what you encounter on the street. The first three chapters of the book are split between three different characters and you go down the class ladder, from upper-upperclass to kids who feed only when they can get away with it. It’s a distinctive period and Schlitz is a master and plunging you directly into that world. I am also happy to report that her ear for language is as pitch perfect as ever. She’s the only author for kids that I know of that can get away with sentences like, “Lizzie Rose corrected him, aspirating the h.”
At the same time no one acts the way you would expect them to. You walk into the novel thinking that orphans Lizzie Rose and Parsefall will be perfect little pseudo-siblings to one another and you’re repeatedly surprised when Parsefall rejects any and all affection from his devoted (if not doting) friend. In fact he’s a fascinating character in and of himself (and at times I almost had the sense that he knew himself to BE a character). He has only one love, one devotion, one obsession in this world and it’s difficult for anything else to make a dent in it. Likewise, when Lizzie Rose interacts with the witch you expect the standard tale where she melts the old woman’s heart against her will. Schlitz doesn’t go in for the expected, though. You will find no schmaltz within these pages. Though the characters’ expectations may line up with the readers’, beware of falling too in love with what somebody on the page wants. You might find your own heart breaking.
Even as a child I had a strange habit of falling in love with storytime’s villains. Captain Hook most notably, but others followed suit. That was part of what was so interesting about the villain Grisini in this book. By all logic I should have developed a crush on him of some sort. Yet Schlitz manages to make him wholly reprehensible and just kind of nasty to boot. He actually doesn’t appear in all that many pages of the book. When he does you are baffled by him. He’s not like a usual villain. He’s almost impotent, though his shadow is long. He also suffers more physically than any other bad guy I’ve encountered in a book for kids. If you’ve ever worried that a no goodnik wasn’t paying sufficiently for their crimes you shall have no such similar objections to Splendors and Glooms. The wages of sin are death and perhaps a bit of bloodletting as well.
I admit (and I’m ashamed to say so now) that when I first read this book I thought to myself, “Well that was delightful but I’m sure I’ll have a hard time persuading other folks to like it as much as I do.” Chalk that one up to my own snotty little assumptions. I’m sure the underlying thought was that I was clearly the right kind of reader and therefore my superior intellect was the whole reason I liked what I had read. Fortunately I was to find that I was nothing more than a snobby snob when it became clear that not only did other librarians love it (librarians who would normally eschew most forms of fantasy if they could possibly help it), kids were enjoying it too! As of this review there are twelve holds on my library’s print copies of Splendors and Glooms and six holds on our two ebook editions! So much for lowered expectations. It is exceedingly rare to find an author who hits it out of the park, so to speak, every single time she writes. Ms. Schlitz has written six published works for children and not one has been anything but remarkable. As adept at fairy stories as fairytales, at straight biographies or melodramatic ghost stories, at long last we see what she can do with a Dickensian setting. Result: She does wonders. Wonders and splendors with just a hint of gloom. The sole downside is sitting and waiting for her next book. If it’s half as good as this one, it’ll be worth the wait.
On shelves now.
Source: Finished copy sent from publisher for review.
Like This? Then Try:
First Sentence: “The witch burned.”
Notes on the Cover: Hands down brilliant. Bagram Ibatoulline (the artist behind it) spends so much time being sweet and meaningful that it’s almost a relief to watch him doing something adequately creepy. Be sure to spot that wonderful skeleton marionette on the back cover. Worth discovering, certainly.
I was also unaware of the British change to both the cover and the book’s very title:
Other Blog Reviews:
Professional Reviews:
Misc:
- Read a sample chapter here.
- What are it’s Newbery chances? Heavy Medals has an opinion on the matter.
Here is a richly realized alternate Victorian world of elegant upper-class homes and squalid faerie slums. Filled with healthy doses of suspense and action, this is a story young fantasy buffs are sure to enjoy. And while he is bound to be compared to Christopher Paolini, whose “Eragon” was also published while he was still in his teens, Bachmann has written an accomplished book that deserves to be considered on its own.
and
Schlitz skillfully manages multiple narratives as the story makes its complex way forward, creating scenes of warmth and humor along with those of drama and horror. Filled with lush language and delightful sensory details like the savored warmth of a velvet cloak, this marvelous story will keep readers absorbed throughout. While the intricate storytelling, captivating characters and evocative setting owe a great deal to Dickens, the book also feels very much in the tradition of such grand 20th-century writers as Joan Aiken and Elizabeth Goudge. Filled with heart-pounding and heart-rending moments, this delicious, glorious novel is the work of a master of children’s literature.
For the rest of my reviews of Stefan Bachmann’s The Peculiar and Laura Amy Schlitz’s Splendors and Glooms in today’s New York Times please go here.
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 4/24/2012
Blog:
A Fuse #8 Production
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Uncategorized,
Peter H. Reynolds,
Laura Amy Schlitz,
Candlewick,
TOON Books,
Doreen Rappaport,
Scott Nash,
David Ezra Stein,
Jon Klassen,
Leslea Newman,
James Howe,
Chris Raschka,
Sean Beaudoin,
Rutu Modan,
librarian previews,
Gary Ross,
Gigi Amateau,
Frank Viva,
David Nytra,
E.M. Kokie,
Fall 2012 previews,
Add a tag
You’ve got your big-time fancy pants New York publishers on the one hand, and then you have your big-time fancy pants Boston publishers on the other. A perusal of Minders of Make-Believe by Leonard Marcus provides a pretty good explanation for why Boston is, in its way, a small children’s book enclave of its own. Within its borders you have publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Candlewick holding court. The only time I have ever been to Boston was when ALA last had a convention there. It was nice, though cold and there are duckling statues.
So it was that the good people of Candlewick came to New York to show off some of their finest Fall 2012 wares. Now the last time they came here they were hosted by SLJ. This time they secured space in the Bank Street College of Education. Better location, less good food (no cookies, but then I have the nutritional demands of a five-year-old child). We were given little signs on which to write our names. I took an extra long time on mine for what I can only assume was an attempt to “win” the write-your-name part of the day. After that, we were off!
First up, it’s our old friend and Caldecott Honor winner (I bet that never gets old for him) David Ezra Stein. The fellow’s been toiling away with his paints n’ such for years, so it’s little wonder he wanted to ratchet up his style a notch with something different. And “something different” is a pretty good explanation of what you’ll find with Because Amelia Smiled. This is sort of a take on the old nursery rhyme that talks about “For Want of a Nail”, except with a happy pay-it-forward kind of spin. Because a little girl smiles a woman remembers to send a care package. Because the care package is received someone else does something good. You get the picture. Stein actually wrote this book as a Senior in art school but has only gotten to writing it officially now. It’s sort of the literary opposite of Russell Hoban’s A Sorely Trying Day or Barbara Bottner’s An Annoying ABC. As for the art itself, the author/illustrator has created a whole new form which he’s named Stein-lining. To create it you must apply crayons to wax paper and then turn it over. I don’t quite get the logistics but I’ll be interested in seeing the results. Finally, the book continues the massive trend of naming girls in works of children’s fiction “Amelia”. Between Amelia Bedelia, Amelia’s Notebook, and Amelia Rules I think the children’s literary populace is well-stocked in Amelias ah-plenty.
Next up, a title that may well earn the moniker of Most Anticipated Picture Book of the Fall 2012 Season. This Is Not My Hat isn’t a sequel to
4 Comments on Librarian Preview: Candlewick Press (Fall 2012), last added: 4/25/2012
I agree 110%!
Your post makes me think of Mildred D. Taylor’s 1997 ALAN acceptance speech, in which she grapples with writing scenes and using language that is potentially painful for readers in her historical fiction about the Logan family:
“I am hurt that any child would ever be hurt by my words. As a parent I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words, but as a parent I do not understand not wanting a child to learn about a history that is part of America, a history about a family representing millions of families that are strong and loving and who remain united and strong, despite the obstacles they face.
In the writing of my most recent work, titled The Land, I have found myself hesitating about using words that would have been spoken in the late 1800s because of my concern about our “politically correct” society. But just as I have had to be honest with myself in the telling of all my stories, I realize I must be true to the feelings of the people about whom I write and true to the stories told. My stories might not be “politically correct,” so there will be those who will be offended, but as we all know, racism is offensive.
It is not polite, and it is full of pain.” http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/spring98/taylor.html
The crucial difference is that you’re writing about the hero of the story holding and expressing racist perspective about , while Taylor is depicting white antagonists in the African-American Logan family’s. I’m eager to hear what others have to say about this.
Thanks, Betsy Bird. Who on earth is reading The Hired Girl and thinking, “That Joan — she really *gets* people”?
I’ve seen variations of this conversation in many places recently, and at bottom I’m not sure the question of this post’s title is really the one being asked. (Or at least, not the one being asked by people raising concerns about the treatment of prejudiced viewpoints in various children’s books.) To me, the question is one that can be more difficult to articulate– not whether a text should include bigoted or otherwise objectionable views, but *how* those views are presented and contextualized within the story. And often, that reading of “how” depends a great deal on one’s own perspective and experiences.
For example, my reading of Joan’s attempt to convert her Jewish employers is informed by my own experiences as a Jewish woman, and also by my knowledge of many other such stories– and the way that conversion is often used as a motif in books written by non-Jews about Jewish experiences. (One could call it a trope.) If I, in sharing my reading, raise issues with Joan’s conversion attempt, then the counter-argument that this element is historically accurate and true to Joan’s character doesn’t really address the issue of context that I’m raising. The question isn’t just about an author’s decision to include prejudiced views and actions, but about *how* the author’s contextual decisions often reflect views the author may or may not be aware of. It seems worth noting that these discussions occur most often in cases where authors are writing about experiences outside of their own identities.
I think the related question– about whether writers should have faith in young readers’ ability to negotiate contextual clues and not take prejudiced views or actions at face value– also falls within this framework. Often, what I see is writers (and critics) discounting the perspectives of young readers who are able to contextualize the *author’s* viewpoint in ways that go against a dominant reading.
For anyone in these discussions who hasn’t read it, I highly recommend Toni Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. See, for example, her reading of Huck Finn. Many might argue that Twain offered an accurate portrayal of the racism of his time period, and that he trusted his readers to see that this is a commentary on racism and not an endorsement of such views. But Morrison’s reading gets at the deeper question I see being asked in these discussions– about how Twain’s decisions as a writer reflect on his own, biased, imagination.
Betsy, while I appreciate you taking this on, you take an argument in which I question one line I one book, in the context of a Newbery Award discussion, to suggest that such a questioning means I distrust child readers In toto, and any controversial passages at all.
We have to be able to talk about issues of race in children’s books, as passionately as we do about the rest of it, without making this a “Black or white” discussion.
The one question I think we can start with is: why did you put the question about what a Native kid reading the book might think as your last concern? Why aren’t we all making that our first concern? Well, because we’re centering our whiteness, is why. Because our entire society centers whiteness, is why. Because we want to get derailed in BUT ARE WE ALLOWED TO EVEN WRITE THIS (clutches pearls clutches pearls). You’re allowed to write any darn thing you want. But that means we, the critical adult audience, are also allowed to then ask hard, uncomfortable questions about that thing you wrote. That’s just part of the deal.
I find that, often, one part of this argument is – you must be the kind of person who only wants NICE things to happen in fiction. You must not care about THE TRUTH. To which, of course, the only response is: depends on who you’re asking to tell you the truth. Let’s take a look at Tim Tingle’s HOW I BECAME A GHOST. There’s a book that is raw and unblinking in its portrayal of what happened to the Choctaw people as they were forced onto the Trail of Tears. Would anyone who has read it say that it is “sanitized” or “nice” version of history? Certainly not. And yet examples like this rarely come up in these conversations about “REAL history isn’t gentle!” Yes, marginalized people know this more than anyone.
I’d also come back to your final line: kid readers, like all of us, can reject something as untrue and still be impacted by it. Sarah raises a good point – “historically accurate, tho!!” doesn’t address the larger issues of what happens when a reader in the here and now interacts with this text. To say that they will simply say, “Well, that’s how it was back then!” and go about their merry way doesn’t address that, in many cases, that’s how it still is today.
I would love to trust readers, too, but trust itself rests on respect, and that respect has not been there for so many people/peoples who have been othered by the media, whether we’re talking about children’s books or films, or whether we’re talking about the past or the present day.
Did anyone click on the link that Jonathan provided? Not the one to my site but the one to his Google search? I think it actually makes my point. Go look. The first three images in the first line (Men/Women/Male Native) are stereotypical–but more important–they are costumes that people can get for Halloween. Because THAT is what comes up first, I think it tells us a lot about what people know about respect for Native people–or rather that they do NOT respect Native people. Maybe they dress up that way out of ignorance, or out of a misguided sense of what it means to honor a people, but I do think it speaks volumes about why we cannot trust the reader.
Once you’re at the point where we’re looking at a particularly book (that someone has already made the decision to publish and promote) and a character and a time period, it certainly makes sense for that particular character to have particular misconceptions and bigotries built into her way of seeing the world.
But when it starts to feel like the primary role of American Indians or people of color in the body of juvenile historical fiction is to provoke white people’s prejudices (or demonstrate what a hero they are for NOT holding those prejudices), or to spur white people to action… that’s a problem for me. When I find myself getting frustrated and exhausted by the way male authors write about women, I can retreat to a big pile of books by women, about women, to reset my internal expectations. (And I hope that men are reading them, too.) Native kids (and non-Native kids who walk around in our current, still-racist world, as Debbie points out) have a MUCH smaller pile of books to resort to–far too few for a kid who’s a prolific reader.
So I guess my question would be “how much more historical fiction about white people do we really need?”
So I guess my question would be “how much more historical fiction about white people do we really need?”
I would argue that stories about lower-class white characters that do more than play on poor-but-good stereotypes, especially in certain historical time periods, are still necessary. The rampant fetishization of the Victorian and Edwardian upper class among adults interested in the time period (just look at vast swaths of steampunk or some of the uglier ends of Downton Abbey fandom), to the detriment of discussions of poverty and the working classes that made that kind of living possible, suggests to me that books like The Hired Girl still absolutely have a place. And as a Catholic child who was often frustrated by depictions of nominal Protestant Christianity in books (The Baby-Sitters Club and Little Women both come to mind as examples that confused and surprised me), the presence of an explicitly Catholic main character like Joan, however imperfect she is, would have meant a great deal to me.
Are those needs as pressing as the need for books that reflect greater racial diversity and respect for audiences of colour? No, I don’t think so. Do those books need to include lines like the one in question here? No, I don’t think so, either. But I question the notion that we’ve exhausted historical fiction about white characters entirely, when there are intersectional issues that remain underwritten and underpublished.
Particularly because my next book tells the story of a prejudiced white character being temporarily fostered by a black family, this discussion has been close to home for me. I felt like it was appropriate to put the character’s assumptions about black people right out front and to make it clear from whence they came (her grandmother) – but I felt like it was equally important to correct those assumptions within the text. Maybe that’s me not trusting my readers to get it right, but it’s like that comedian who quit because he wasn’t sure people were laughing at the right part of his jokes — you don’t want to hold up something to ridicule (or, at least *I* don’t) and let a reader walk away with the idea that the idea is correct. To my mind, there are indeed subtleties in this – racism is insidious in its pervasiveness, as is sexism, etc.. I know it’s gauche for writers to “send messages” in our work, and we have all recently heard and rehashed the big argument against having an “diversity agenda” in writing, but I believe we all write with purpose, if we are wise. There are choices to be made in subtly asserting our beliefs and gently righting misconceptions, as it were… And all writers make a choice to acknowledge this or not, I guess, based on what we feel is important.
Books like THE HIRED GIRL, which have a lot to like in them despite the issues, provide the means for us to learn how to be fans of problematic things, to learn how to listen and sit with the discomfort of maybe not catching things which upset other people, and for me, at least, to be a better writer. I know thinking about this won’t help me produce a perfect book – good luck with that, huh? – but a more thoughtful book in this world of reflexive, unrepentant and systemic prejudice can only be a good thing.
[…] are some lively debates going on at Heavy Medal and Fuse #8 about Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, a presumed favorite for 2016 Newbery consideration. […]
I’m with the writer of this article all the way. Ms. Bird is correct that falsification of history (and our ancestors’ sensibilities) for the sake of contemporary political correctness not only shortchanges the readers, it robs them of the opportunity to know where mankind has been and how far we’ve come. It’s one of my peeves with so much “historical” fiction. It isn’t historical at all. It’s contemporary with decorations of older superficial details.
Writing for young readers is a responsibility, and writing about other times and places for any age is a greater responsibility still. Tell the characters’ truth.
Sure! To be clear, I don’t think the answer to my question is “none.” But as people who are outside the Newbery committee, we have the luxury of looking at this particular text as a part of a larger field of literature. My first, lizard-brain, instinctive pushback to “but it’s historically accurate!” is often “but this might be the only line a student reads about American Indians all year!”, and that’s a problem that this book alone can’t solve, and that I don’t expect it to.
I do consider plucky lower-class historical white girls to be overrepresented (without having actually done a count), but you’re right that many of them appear in poor-but-good morality tales, and I’d believe that few of them are explicitly and accurately Catholic.
Betsy, I responded above in defense against your two paragraphs starting “Does it come right out…” as I felt that was putting words in my mouth, but perhaps I was only choosing to take personal offense. I do think that’s skewing the argument I was trying to make at Heavy Medal. If we can put that aside, I agree with nearly everything you say, except for your final assessment of how well this all works in HIRED GIRL. I’ve tried to explain why here: http://blogs.slj.com/heavymedal/2015/10/15/the-hired-girl/#comment-218683
Into this discussion, and by no means to turn it into a discussion about something else, I just want to interject that we need more Roman Catholic characters in children’s lit. When I first read The Hired Girl I cringed for Joan’s behavior regularly (who didn’t?), but one of my first thoughts was that I couldn’t believe she *was* Roman Catholic. It blew my socks off! She’s the main character too, not a secondary character! All through reading the book I felt grateful for that.
Thank you, Betsy. This was a beautifully, thoughtfully written post. I feel like a lot of the conversation occurring on Heavy Medal is “But what will the children think?!” – which is the *exact* argument challengers used when attempting to ban two books from my library in the last couple years (Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty and Monster).
Thanks, Nina. Naturally I meant no offense to you. I should note that the term “it comes right out” is a screenwriting phrase I picked up from my husband about elements of a storyline that can be removed without detriment to the whole.
Thank you for your thoughtful and swift reply. My comment was a bit too much tangent for me to be comfortable with, in retrospect, and so in interest of not derailing the conversation further than I already have (and I apologize for that), I just want to acknowledge that I’ve read your answer and wish you a good day.
Thank you, Tanita! That’s exactly what I felt when I first read Debbie Reese’s post about this: “the discomfort of maybe not catching things which upset other people.” I had no memory of the passage, so I’m grateful to other people for pointing it out. It still surprises me that I can breeze by passages that might be hurtful to others, because, as a librarian, I think it’s part of my job to help kids read critically, and to show them it’s okay to be critical of things they like. I hope conversations like this will make me a better librarian, too.
This post focuses on how young people might read irony in a text– that is, whether they recognize the ironic distance between author and character (which I still don’t think is the issue those objecting to the passage are really raising.) But I just wanted to add that I think the dynamics of how young readers interact with books, and with the prejudices in them, is one of the central themes in The Hired Girl itself. Joan is first and foremost a reader. Her knowledge of the world comes partly through the books she reads, and she also, increasingly, uses her knowledge of the world to read against those beloved books. This back and forth of contextualization and re-contextualization includes her attitudes and conceptions about Jewish people, for example, and about prejudice. She uses the knowledge she’s gleaned from Ivanhoe to try to understand the Jewish people she meets, and then uses her experiences with the Jewish people she knows to contextualize attitudes presented in Ivanhoe.
But I think the picture of reading included within The Hired Girl also points to some of the problems people are addressing. As Debbie notes, this work of contextualization depends on the other experiences with which one reads against a text. Joan’s reading when she’s at the farm is different than her reading once she’s lived with the Rosenbachs. For most non-Native readers in the US, those other experiences include a litany of misrepresentations in books and media, little accurate knowledge, and few relationships with actual Native people. When it comes to the presentation of Jewish people in this book, I would also argue there are many images and associations Schlitz herself has absorbed from books like Ivanhoe, which maintain their hold on the imagination despite real knowledge of Jewish people. This includes the supposedly “good” stereotype of the idealized Rebecca. I think books can work on the imagination even when we have the means to put them in context.
As Angie says, all of this also continues to center the perspective of the reader who is encountering people and prejudices from the outside– not the reader whose context is their own very real, painful experiences as the target of those prejudices. Books like Roll of Thunder center the child *experiencing* prejudice, which is different from a book that focalizes a character with prejudiced views. In the later case, again, I don’t think the question is one of accuracy or even inclusion, but of how the author treats and understands both those views, and the reader who has experience with them that the author lacks.
I don’t believe Betsy is suggesting you distrust child readers in toto, just that you distrust them about this.