Think Pink!

Mitali Perkins Facebooked and Twittered a question to her friends: "should an author describe the race of a character or leave it to the reader's imagination?"

Good question, and she got some good answers. (Thanks, Gail, for the tip.)

It's a question we also face in reviewing--when do we mention the ethnicity or skin color of a character and when do we not? Sometimes, relaying details of the story will make things clear enough, but it's tougher when reviewing everyday-life-type stories, especially picture books, where the characters happen to be one color or another in a way that has no particular effect on the story or theme. And, as Justina Chen Headley points out in Mitali's post, we tend to mention skin color only when that color is not white. Awwwwwkward. I remember when Ms. magazine made a go of using "European American" wherever white people showed up in a story but it didn't last.

(And, really, there should be some kind of prize for the awkward ways in which well-meaning children's writers signal skin color: "Kathy's cocoa-brown-with-a-hint-of-whipped-cream face glowed warmly as she reveled in the attention of her more boringly-tinted friends." Yeah, I made that up but you know what I mean.)

From the land of the long white cloud

Elissa is back from Middle-Earth--and tea with Margaret Mahy, who apparently lives in a cliff. For today's pop quiz, translate and i.d. the following:


"Ki raro au!" hei tā ikā.
E kore pai ki āu!
Ki raro!" hei tā ikā
"E KORE au hia takā!"

Listen to the children!

Maybe Sherry Jones, whose The Jewel of Medina was cancelled by Ballantine for fear of Muslim terrorist rage, was just working with the wrong division of Random House. The copyright page of each fall 08 Random House ARC I've received states "Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read."

So which is it?

Two books reviewed in the forthcoming issue of the Horn Book Guide:

From Bearport, Meish Goldish's Deadly Praying Mantis

From Lerner, Sandra Markle's Praying Mantises: Hungry Insect Heroes

Nothing* p.o.'d the late Zena Sutherland more than a nonfiction children's book ascribing virtue or venality to animals.

*Except maybe simultaneous translation in dialogue, as in "'Hola, Juan!' exclaimed the pretty teacher to the new brown-eyed and chubby-cheeked boy, 'Hello.'"

Stick to Your Own Kind?

I'm intrigued by Arthur Laurents's plans to bring West Side Story to Broadway next winter in a "bilingual revival," having the Puerto Rican characters speaking Spanish and otherwise making the show "more realistic." (Here's hoping he doesn't try to set it in the present, though, because that gorgeous, swanky 1950s brass would sound as corny as Kansas in August.)

That theme of bridging cultures (I know WSS is based on R&J, but making the Montagues and Capulets into Jets and Sharks throws us into contemporary contexts) came to me yesterday when I was editing a Guide review of The Umbrella Queen, a picture book by Shirin Yim Bridges and Taeeun Yoo. Apparently based on the "umbrella village" of Bo Sang in northern Thailand, the story is about a little girl, Noot, who longs to paint umbrellas the way all the women in the village do, but instead of painting the traditional patterns of flowers and butterflies, she paints elephants. The Thai king comes to judge the umbrellas in the annual contest and names Noot the winner, "because she paints from her heart." It's a nice enough little story, but has an unacknowledged dynamic that shows up time and again in American books for children about "other cultures," allegedly honoring different cultural norms but in fact contravening them to celebrate the spirit of individual expression. (Historical fiction does this too, as Anne Scott MacLeod wrote in a brilliant essay for us.) It's a case where the story's need for conflict subverts its simultaneous claim on cultural authenticity. There's no story if Noot happily paints flowers and butterflies, but the fact that she triumphs by painting elephants says, in effect, that the tradition that inspired the story isn't worth holding on to. Can you have it both ways?

Craigslist or Freaky Friday?

Missed Connections: leaving Stony Brook station around 6:00 PM yesterday. Me, tall middle-aged man in a bowtie listening to iPod. You, medium-height young woman reading the Horn Book.

Any authors out there ever similarly catch a reader unawares?

Join the Cool Kids!

We're on Facebook now. Really, I have no idea what this means. But come play with us!

Yes, and you're not helping

Woman to man this evening, overheard as I'm jogging by: "Your English skills are deplorable."

Good for the Jews

and good for you, too: Claire's latest booklist.

That's Why We Clap

Saturday night we went to see a semi-pro production of Puccini's Turandot in the dining hall of Lowell House, a Harvard College dorm that has been putting on operas since the 1920s. Turandot is pretty grand as these things go and the production didn't miniaturize anything--full orchestra, colorful (very "Oriental") sets and costumes, big voices in the big parts. The program, and a preshow announcer, politely admonished us to applaud only at the end of an act, a request (rather stuffy, but maybe they were worried about time) that the audience adhered to until Calaf's big third-act opening number, "Nessun Dorma." We all clapped madly.

It was practically Pavlovian. We clapped because it was a beautiful performance, but also because we knew the tune and loved it, and we knew other people knew the tune and loved it--group hug, anyone? "Nessun Dorma" is a high culture artifact that secured a place for itself outside the gates when it was kicked over the wall by Luciano Pavarotti at the 1990 World Cup. Now it shows up everywhere (fabulously by Aretha Franklin at the 1998 Grammys); it has nothing to do with Turandot; and you can get it as a ringtone.

Purists scorn but I love this. Opera buffs are like librarians or anybody in a community of shared aesthetic commitment (although Wayne Kostenbaum writes that putting two opera queens in the same room spells trouble). Everybody likes being an insider to something, whether it's opera or--I hoped I would get here--children's books. We saw that in spades here last week, when children's-book-lovers came together to rail at what they perceived was an attack by me on their affections. But it was also a very in-groupy fight on all sides, one amongst ourselves, the kind of debate that reinforces allegiance to the group because all sides agree that This Matters.

I don't think we adults who love children's books do so to be insidery (hmm, children's books or high fashion. Which will make me cooler?) but our shared love does give us an inside to be in. We like having a cultural vocabulary shared by a few, but we are also aware that the reason we're few is because children's books don't matter to most adults. This cognitive dissonance can cause both anxiety and a pleasant sense of superiority.

So we too like it when one of Ours is kicked over the wall, whether it's everybody reading Harry Potter or, my favorite example, a country song that can cite Charlotte's Web ("now I'm the one that's caught in . . .") and assume that listeners will know the reference. It reinforces our superiority (we knew Harry Potter before he was Harry Potter) and soothes our anxiety (if Charlotte's Web is part-of-everything then maybe I am too). Mostly it's just nice to have your affections confirmed, like when you convince a friend to like a book or a song you like. It makes you like it even more.

Hard books and awards

Australian Sonya Harnett has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an honor that speaks to the discussion we're having about Nina Lindsay's comments about "shelf-sitters." Completely deserving of the many awards her writing has won, Hartnett is, however, no crowd-pleaser. While as a culture we are used to the fact that adult fiction with a small audience routinely beats out bestsellers at awards time, we don't seem to like it so much when something similarly "literary" for children competes for shelf space, attention and awards alongside books that have wider appeal. "No kid is going to read this" is something we have all said. That can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, if the person who says it therefore decides not to review it or buy it for a library.

This is a situation as old as libraries but has become more prominent as a) libraries have become less elitist and more responsive to popular taste and b) book budgets have shrunk, making it more attractive to purchase something that will circulate twenty times rather than twice. It's hard to imagine it now, but there was a time when juvenile hardcover fiction was only found in libraries. Expectations were smaller, so were print runs, and thus smaller books had a chance. Is this still true? Could Sonya Hartnett thrive in America?

It's more than horse books

There's a piece on the International Children's Digital Library in today's Boston Globe that inspired me to take another browse over there. The ICDL is currently running a bunch of features on Mongolia, which fits in nicely with my Silk Road kick--I'm reading Colin Thubron's Shadow of the Silk Road and listening to Sainkho Namtchylak, kind of a Mongolian Bjork.

The ICDL reader is still kind of cranky on my computer--much as I love Jeannette Winter's The Christmas Tree Ship I wish it would let me read something else--but browsing through the Mongolian-language books on the site is in itself an education. Nice pictures, too--look especially at the books by Bolormaa Baasanuren.

White man speaks

Debbie Reese revisits one of the more interesting events of my years here. In another recent entry she talks about author John Smelcer's aspirations to Indian-ness. Our review of The Trap didn't mention it, but the jacket flap does claim that the author is "of Ahtna Athabaskan descent," which apparently he isn't, although his adoptive parents are Indian.

Debbie asks if publishers or reviewers might vet an author's claims to Indian-ness. If I were a publisher, I would want to, but I would also want to trust the writers I published. As a reviewer, I don't think I'd know how to go about it. As Debbie acknowledges, it would be ethically dubious to do this for Indian claims but not for others, but forget the workload issue, who would you ask? What would constitute an acceptable answer? And as with all questions involving "authentic representation," who gets to decide?

I'm pondering the parallels and differences between Smelcer's claims (and he's certainly not the first white guy to "play Indian") and those of people who passed themselves off as white and/or male to get what they wanted, be it publication or remuneration or freedom. Your thoughts?

Money

In the February issue of Harper's, Ursula K. LeGuin has some interesting things to say about reading ("reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness--not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering") and publishing ("What's in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don't you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?").

But until you get your hands on Harper's, take a look at what Groundwood's Patsy Aldana had to say in our pages a few years back: "I would posit that the greatest, most defining boundary in our cozy little world of children’s books is money."

As Betty and Wilma say, "CHARGE!"

Children's Book Shop proprietress Terri Schmitz talks with Kitty Flynn about children's-book shopping for the holidays and recommending some of her favorites on our latest podcast.

I'll be over soon, Terri. We've got this swell Dutch couple renting our first floor apt and they have two completely adorable kids--a one year old boy and a three year old girl. Richard and I feel like we've acquired grandchildren and are spoiling them appropriately. The little girl, of course, initially spoke no English, and she would talk away at us in Dutch, too young to understand that we couldn't understand her. But then she and I had our Patty Duke--Anne Bancroft moment. She was talking to me in Dutch and clearly had an important question. I saw this little light go on in her eyes and she blurted, "Wheah's Wichawd?" Thanks, kid-- but spoken like a born Bostonian.

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!

RedSoxtober

Barring funerals, pretty much the only time I hear from my now far-flung McNally relatives is when the Red Sox are doing well at whatever it is they do. Which, I guess, they've done. Honestly, I feel like I should trade houses with my California (or Delaware, Maryland . . .) cousins, because while I live a scant three miles from Fenway Park, the only reason I even check the game schedule is to find out if we're going to have trouble parking for the movies. I went to a game once, forty-five years ago with my Cub Scout troop (oops, I automatically spelled that troupe, how gay is that?) and all I remember is that we got popcorn in little cardboard megaphones. But I'm glad my family is happy.

I've got a three-way going on with Jules and Eisha, the gals of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, reviewing Perry Moore's Hero; check it out.

Going to New York for a few days to see Elizabeth and attend a memorial celebration for Lloyd Alexander; tonight I'll be dining with the Child_Lit crowd, bloggers Betsy, Cheryl and Monica among them. That should be particularly lively as the list is currently divided among* those who think J. K. Rowling is a hero for her recent revelation re Dumbledore, those who think she is a publicity-seeking fame whore, and those like myself who haven't read Book Seven and are just staying out of the whole thing.

* Joanna Rudge Long recently called me on following between with three things. Is it really wrong?

I'm guessing Greenwitch will be a whole 'nother ball of wax.

The upcoming opening of The Seeker, formerly known as The Dark is Rising, has a lot of people on edge, not least Susan Cooper. I'm reminded of another time this title got in trouble, branded as racist in 1976 by the Council on Interracial Books for Children in their Human and Anti-Human Values in Children's Books: A Content Rating Instrument for Educators and Parents. And it was the title itself that got Cooper's book in hot water with this crowd, who believed that the equation of darkness with evil was "racist by commission," meaning overtly harmful. If I recall right, The Dark Is Rising was also labeled "racist by omission," by the CIBC, because it didn't have any black characters. I'll have to remember to ask Susan what she thought about all this.

Shout-out in Shul

HB reviewer Lauren Adams and I went with our nice Jewish boys to Kol Nidre services last night, where none other than that nice Jewish girl, our own Jane Yolen, was referenced in the sermon. The theme was something about "remembering the person you always wanted to be," and Jane was brought into it via an essay she wrote about the power of stories to make sense of our lives. Mazel Tov, Jane!

Kathy Griffin Isn't the Only One to Drag Jesus into It

And at least she was funny. Last month, we got a letter from a woman who decided she wanted to cancel her subscription to the Magazine because of Patty Campbell's report on the word fuck, Susan Patron's account of the little scrotum that could (and did) and our then upcoming special issue on gender, the one you, ahrmmm, should be holding in your hands. Fine. Let her go join those subscribers who left when I presumed to give some advice to the First Lady. (Incidentally, young Jenna's book has some good things going for it; see my review in our November issue.)

But then. But. Then. We sent this disgruntled former subscriber a refund for the balance of her subscription, and apparently we mistakenly mailed her two checks or something, and Margaret, our business manager, asked her to send one back. All she had to do was stick it in an envelope or, hell, say "Suck it, Horn Book," and cash it but NOOOOOO. "I received your message on Wednesday and am happy to return the check that was written in error. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I cannot take from Horn Book what is not due me. It would not be honoring to my savior, and so here is the check."

I think I'll use it to buy her a Mass.

Bounced Back

As a few people have noted on last week's crankypants post, the SLJ site (and the unstoppable Fuse) are rid of the tawdry bijoux that decorated them. It's safe to go back.

People Are Not Inherently Evil

I'm just back from a run; it was hot and my legs felt like they were encased in molasses. But about halfway through I came upon a great scene: a family of geese crossing the Jamaica Way. I hate geese, but this gaggle of two adults and seven young ones was inspiring. The grownups led the way, pausing at the curb to let a few fast-moving cars by, then sauntering, leisurely but with a definite aim, across the street while each of the four lanes of cars stopped in turn. (This is Boston, where nobody is sentimental about geese, and in no way was the entire flow of traffic going to stop for them.) If you know that street, you'll know how dangerous it can be to drive, much less cross. My hat's off to the Sunday drivers!

I have a story about Boston ducklings, too, and I'll put up the link to that tomorrow.

And how!

I was happy to see Debbie Reese confirm my impression of American Girl World as hostile territory. Why people continue to see this empire as good for children is beyond me. If you want to educate your children into the joys of brand loyalty and conspicuous consumption, at least Disney is more affordable. And the catalog? Yup, still porn.

Brahma, mon dieux!

We saw one of my favorite operas on Sunday, Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, premiered in 1863 and putatively set in Ceylon. Its big tune, a duet for tenor and baritone, is apparently England's perennial number one favorite. The Opera Boston production we saw played the Orientalism up to the hilt, with shadow puppets, projections of many-handed (I'm guessing) Hindu gods, and sinuous dancing girls. I'm guessing it was no more "authentic" than the opera itself, which shamelessly indulges itself and the audience in exotica.

It made me remember a sumptuous picture book edition of Aida by Leontyne Price and the Dillons, trumpeted by the publisher as a retelling, via Verdi, as an African story. Nope, pure Italiano, based on a scenario by a French Egyptologist. And Turandot is about as Chinese as I am. These operas make me think about our own field's stern requirements for cultural authenticity and against Orientalism. Bizet, Verdi, and Puccini would be banished from the shelves. I guess I should be grateful they are operas, not books, and thus subjected to grown-up criteria that acknowledge the presence and even perniciousness of stereotyping without making it the trump card of evaluation.

Androne here

And I'm a modest and shy ocelot who loves long walks in the rain. Have you picked your daemon yet?

Tish! That's French!

GalleyCat's report on an article (that originally appeared in The Bookseller, whose online subscription is veddy expensive* and thus to whom I cannot link) about books that prosper on either side of the Atlantic but sink when they venture across reminds me of Ben Brantley's recent NYT piece exposing our country's fetish for English accents ("so silken, so stately, so, well, so darned cultured") that I have long accused Hazel Rochman of trading upon. I like the quote about The Thirteenth Tale: "There are two incidences towards the end where they drink cocoa. I haven't drunk cocoa since I was a child. That picture of cocoa-drinking England only appeals outside England." It also makes me wonder if this is the reason that Donna Leon's Venice-set mysteries starring the to-die-for Commissario Guido Brunetti have not, according to Wikipedia, ever been translated into Italian.

*from the same company that brings you the similarly overpriced Kirkus Reviews.

Dutch Trick or Treat

Editing an article for an upcoming issue of the Magazine, I needed to find some information about Lucy Fitch Perkins' The Dutch Twins, and found via Google a digital library which contained it. The Baldwin Project is a real time-sucker of a place--that's a compliment--and after reading about the Twins and their ever-informative mother ( "I shall have milk enough to make butter and cheese," said Vrouw Vedder. "There are no cows like our Dutch cows in all the world, I believe") I found myself wandering around the place, which is apparently intended primarily as a resource for home-schoolers of a certain ilk, such ilk being those parents who believe anything worth reading was published before their own grandparents were born.

While I understand that the Baldwin Project necessarily only collects works that have gone out of copyright, and that we have much to learn from the past, I sure hope that no parent thinks these books will constitute an education. Along with digital editions of the books themselves, the site includes outlines for two curricula, Waldorf and Ambleside (based on the ideas of English educator Charlotte Mason) apparently in some repute among homeschoolers. But surely Waldorf founder Rudolf Steiner and Charlotte Mason would take issue with the assumption that the world would not move on without them. Could they truly endorse the idea espoused in Ian D. Colvin's South Africa, published in 1910, that, in considering the rival claims of the Boers and the English settlers of that country, that:

The British ideal has been in the long run a better one. We need labour for mines, and railways, docks, farms, and plantations. Therefore we give the native peace and justice, and a share of the land which is surely big enough for all. But at the same time we must be master of the black people. No good British Governor or British settler has ever preached equality: that has been left to the old ladies at home.

This is only an egregious extreme of a collection that is for the most part middlebrow and harmless (and valuable for those interested in an archive of what has been thought appropriate for the young) but do parents really teach from it? The world must look exceedingly strange to them, and let's hope their kids get some unsupervised time at the public library.

Reading along

Yesterday I was having one of the few unalloyed pleasures of my job, where I was asked to read a book merely for another opinion. We were beyond the yea-or-nay stage of reviewing it--the reviewer and Martha agreed it was really good--and I was just reading it to Keep Up.

See, the problem with being a professional reviewer is that you know that following even the most pleasurable read is a deadline. You have to 'splain yourself, Lucy. It's going to turn into work. And I'm in the camp that believes it's harder to review a book you love than it is one you don't. So the more you love something, the greater the challenge rises (is it because I was reading on a Sunday morning that I'm starting to feel like a Unitarian minister?).

All of this is just preamble to the fact that I like to listen to music when I read "for fun." (Never when I'm reading to review, or when I'm writing.) A psychologist I know says that we never actually do listen and read at the same time, more like one activity takes over during lapses in the other, but I like the landscape the music puts me in. Call me crazy, but I sometimes put music on when I'm going out, ostensibly for Buster's enjoyment but really because I secretly believes it means the house will be a better place for the experience--back from vacation, so to speak,*--when I return.

Dork alert: I try to program music that goes with my book. I have, for example, a cd of music Jane Austen liked that's good for when I'm reading her. Villa-Lobos for magical realism. Elgar for epics of Empire. Tense mysteries get tense music. Spy stories set amidst neo-Nazis in the Antarctic--you'd be surprised how much music the cold continent has inspired.

I had read a bit of my assigned-but-no-strings book already, and I remembered that it had lots of eccentric characters, an elliptical narration, and not much of a plot--in other words, it was Canadian. So I cranked up the Gavin Bryars only to realize the novel was in fact set in Australia, and that Bryars himself is only marginally Canadian, so my theory of geographical affinity went completely to pot. So As African American mezzo Shirley Verrett said, upon walking down the hall of a music school and hearing what she thought was a black singer singing spirituals "like she was from deepest Mississippi" only to open the practice room door to see a Korean girl going phonetically through "Deep River," "there goes that."

Having now finished the book, Judith Clarke's One Whole and Perfect Day (Front Street), I see that I should have gone with Mozart. Bee-yoo-ti-ful counterpoint, and it's a book about happiness.

*(For an entertaining take on this very notion, look for The House Takes a Vacation, a picture book by Jacqueline Davies and Lee White, published this month by Marshall Cavendish.)