Who Will Read About Whom?

Responding to the drama about Bloomsbury twice whitewashing a character on a book jacket, Mitali Perkins has a poll going on about how young readers react to covers with non-white characters. Go on over and cast your vote.

One thing and one thing only I want to say about the Bloomsbury covers and the call to boycott the publisher: Doesn't anyone think it's great that Bloomsbury is actually publishing books about kids of color where the color is not exactly the main thing? Okay, two more things: would Liar and Magic Under Glass have been published if their authors were not white, and would the covers have been the same?

Books under wraps

Lolly took this neat picture of what our book collection looks like during remodeling. I can't quite tell where in the alphabet this is.

Help me out?

Martha and I are looking for illustrations for our forthcoming book for parents and want to include an iconic cover or illustration from a YA book that shows a teen reading. Any bells ringing? I was hopeful for The Book Thief but it's got dominoes.

But enough about you. Or me.

As we did late last year, Child_Lit has been discussing the U.K.'s age-banding proposal with some ferocity the past few days. While I am firmly in the camp of those who oppose the scheme, a speech Philip Pullman gave on the subject is working my nerves. It's very much a speech to the choir (which it was, being delivered at a conference of the Society of Authors), and at the beginning quotes from the research report that allegedly boosts the proposal: "A recent trade survey has shown a general preference to move to age ranging, although with some strongly held contrary views, but now what’s needed is a piece of research that delivers some definitive answers from the people who matter most – book customers and readers."

Pullman then clutches his rhetorical pearls for this response:

The people who matter most?

Whoever wrote that – whoever read that and believed it – needs to be reminded that without us, without our work, our talent, our willingness to put up with almost anything in the way of reduced royalties, humiliating treatment over jacket design, endless travels to this bookshop, that school, that library, anything to help our books reach the readers – without us there would be no editors, no designers, no marketing teams, no publicity people, no secretaries, no helpful personal assistants, no senior executives, no expense account lunches, no pension schemes, no company cars, no sales conferences in attractive places, no publishing industry whatsoever. Any of the people who do those other things could be replaced with very little difference. Take us away, and you’ve lost everything. The people who matter most? Authors and illustrators are the people who matter most, and no publisher with any sense of what’s right and true would have allowed that sentence, and that attitude, to stand.

While I agree it would have been both politic and useful to ask writers what they thought of the idea of printing suggested reading levels on book covers, jeez, Philip, get over your bad self. I ask, with similarly high-camp drama but equal sincerity, isn't anyone thinking about the children? They are the people who matter most in this question. They are the ones who will have to suffer walking around with a book they want to read but are officially too mature for; they are the ones who will be told "you aren't ready" for a book deemed Too Hard. The problem with the age-banding proposal is not that it ignores authors, it's that it ignores young readers.

Somebody owes Lisa Yee a Mac

(Thanks to Lolly Robinson for the tip.)

Code Pink

Scanning the multitudes of new books throughout the office, I am struck--again--by the endurance of pink covers on light teen girl fiction. I know this is nothing new; what interests me is the fact that I wrote about this four years ago, and I'm surprised it still works--not the chicklit formula, which is eternal, but that pink remains the go-to color. When does this kind of genre marker stop signaling "Here I am! The kind of book you like!" and start saying "I've got your number"? Do girls who like this sort of thing appreciate the code, or do they roll their eyes and read despite it? There was a story in PW some years ago about two African American women in a bookstore laughing about the omnipresence of the word "Sister" in the titles of books marketed to black women, suggesting that the ploy had run its course. Will pink? Ever?

What's the difference between confidence and fluency?

Commenter Zolah passed along this story about a proposed scheme in the U.K. to label children's books by "reading age." Let's hope the Brits don't try to bring this one into Boston Harbor. The organizers claim that children will not be put off by having their books belly-branded with "early, "developing," "confident," or "fluent," but I know I would. And who will be assigning the designations and by what criteria: will individual publishers make their best guesses (there goes "for all ages") or will a central Authority feed all the books through a Lexile machine?

What I'd mostly like to know is what the presence of these labels is supposed to do. The article calls the idea "an important breakthrough in children's literacy," but how?

Someone must have read the book in the meantime

the ARC:




the finished book:




Deirdre Baker has some pertinent thoughts (from "Musings on Diverse Worlds," Horn Book Magazine, January/February 2007):

In some cases, where the politics of inclusivity is not in the foreground of the story, the racial attributes of nonwhite heroes are rendered virtually invisible. Both Ged of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series and Eugenides of Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief and sequels are described explicitly as "dark-skinned." Indeed, in conversation Turner has said that the images in her head of the Eddisians were "deeply influenced by the people of the Himalayas." But the brown skins of Ged and of Eugenides are downplayed by the books' current cover art, which shows Ged to be as bronzed as a white surfer (The Tombs of Atuan, 2001 edition) and Eugenides to have a noticeably pink and white complexion (The King of Attolia, 2006). While the texts give nonwhite readers the opportunity to see themselves reflected in these heroes, the cover art is telling them something else.

I'm glad this cover art changed its mind!

Well, you do know it's going over the net.

I like the commenter on Alison Morris's new ShelfTalker blog at PW (welcome, Alison) who says that the cover for the new Harry Potter looks like our lad is serving a tennis ball.

Maybe if I had read Harry while imagining he looked like Roger Federer I might have gotten further in the series than 2.5. And there's a Higher Power of Lucky joke somewhere in here but I can't seem to get my hands on it.