New Podcast

In our latest podcast, Martha Parravano talks to Catherine Gilbert Murdock about Princess Ben (Houghton), a slyly subversive--and satisfyingly romantic--fantasy that is receiving a starred review in the upcoming May/June issue of the Horn Book.

It's a Mystery

Colleen Mondor wonders why there aren't more YA mysteries. And now, so do I. After reading her post, I did a quick search of hornbookguide.com, querying for mystery and detective stories for YA (grades 7 and up)published in 2007. I got twenty hits, but most were, as Colleen suggested, for either general realistic or fantasy fiction with a mystery element rather than some kind of straight-up detective procedural. Years ago I looked at teen reading-interest surveys which consistently showed that kids named "mysteries" as their favorite genre, but their definition of such was broad--Flowers in the Attic, for example. But it seems to me there have been better eras for teen mysteries as traditionally defined: writers such as Jay Bennett, Lois Duncan and Joan Lowery Nixon used to turn them out regularly. (That was, however, back when YA was mostly thought of as junior high.) I dunno--maybe teen mystery fans are so used to crossing over to adult (the way adult fantasy fans cross over to juvenile) that they fail to constitute an imperative market? Or are the exigencies of the murder mystery, particularly, and those of teen life too incompatible to seem credible? Great, now I'm picturing Encyclopedia Brown chasing Hannibal Lecter . . . .

Are you out there, Nancy Werlin? What do you think?

I Think She Might Have Liked Mine More

Horn Book reviewer Christine Heppermann heard a Who at the cineplex this weekend. I saw Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, which felt like a YA novel written by Robbe-Grillet, when in fact it was based on a YA novel written by Blake Nelson. It was good.

What are the odds?

The New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books have been announced; as commenter Ruth notes on a previous post, the gender score is eight to two. Elsewhere in the Times's special section on children's books I review Jaclyn Moriarty's The Spell Book of Listen Taylor (Levine/Scholastic).

I note with only fortuitous smugness that the last time I judged this list, in 2005, we selected five male and five female illustrators. But I didn't know this until now, as Henrike Wilson (winning for Brave Charlotte) and Alexis Deacon (for Jitterbug Jam) didn't come to the party.

Creative Writing Exercise

Try and rewrite this story, forwarded to me by Kitty and Zoe, as an episode in a YA novel by:

a) Jack Gantos
b) Cecily von Ziegesar
c)Chris Crutcher
d) Paula Fox

Compare and contrast. I thought of including Ron Koertge among the choices, but this scene already practically happens in his first novel Where the Kissing Never Stops.

Hitting Them over the Head

Child_Lit has been unusually lively the last couple of weeks, with discussions of The Dark is Rising, Love You Forever (again), gypsies, and gay-seeming children all perking along nicely, but what has intrigued me most is a thread inspired by a post from GraceAnne DeCandido, who has given me permission to reproduce it here:

Dear colleagues,
it is one of those teaching days that make one want to scream and
throw things (the Yankees loss last night did not help, but I
digress).

Several of my students (graduate students all) think that if they
buy a book or give a booktalk or promote a book to a teacher or a
class it means somehow that they condone and approve everything
that takes place in a book. They cannot, for example, buy or
promote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist because that means
they approve of the language (which is salty and true to life). One
student objected to the grammar and usage in Walter Dean
Myers' books because she felt it didn't model good and
appropriate speech.

This is of course all connected to the teaching book/didacticism
thread we have had. I am teaching a literature course to adult
people studying for the MLIS degree. I need to find ways of
addressing this issue, although I am puzzled so much by their
attitudes that I scarce know where to begin.

Well my dear GA, I think three things are going on here. First, either these students aren't readers or they've forgotten that kids read the same way grownups do: just as reading a Donna Leon mystery does not overwhelm me with the urge to push someone into the Grand Canal, reading Nick and Norah . . . isn't going to introduce the word fuck into a spoken vocabulary from which it was previously absent. So, I think we're talking about library school students who don't love reading, which makes me want to jump into the Grand Canal.

But here's the second thing, which is worse: humans over time have demonstrated an inordinate fondness for the ability to push around those of their kind who are smaller and weaker. And some people, especially people who don't like to read, use books as weapons in service to this objective. This goes for books that are either suppressed or required when the point of either action is to control what another person thinks or does.

The third thing, though, can give us all hope; namely, that these grad students are laughably deluded if they think any child really cares what the librarian thinks.

But I wonder if these students really are the grammatically correct Polly Puremouths they're presenting themselves as. Are they truly worried about modeling bad behavior, or are they just afraid to get in trouble with other adults? That fondness for picking on the vulnerable doesn't look so good when the vulnerable is you.

And then they were upon her, and with good reason, too.

Fuse8 posts a link to what she accurately characterized as another hand-wringing piece about allegedly depressing YA novels on reading lists, but I am even more depressed by the author (a professor of creative writing, no less) condemning some "young adult fiction", unnamed, where "a town holds a lottery. At first it seems like an innocent exercise, but the author slowly reveals that the winner of the lottery will be sacrificed."

We had joy, we had fun

Perhaps inspired by the Spring Awakening music (too rockeroo for the high-school me but I love it now), I was tempted by this top one hundred songs of your senior year meme, but had to swiftly back away when I saw what they were. I don't recognize half of them and won't own to remembering most of the others, but it did make me wonder if there was some kind of calculus of regret and denial for those of us who, as adults, make our livings in professions devoted to the young. Do we do it because we liked being kids? Or because we didn't, and are trying to patch that over? Does being embarrassed by the tastes of your younger self make you a better or worse librarian? If you still love "Dark Lady," are you hopeless? More or less so if you never did learn the words?

Adolescent upsets

In addition to the satisfying spectacle of Maria Sharapova being picked off by a younger (and quieter!) player, I was also treated this past weekend to a superb exposition of teen angst, in the unlikely Broadway musical Spring Awakening. Based on Frank Wedekind's 1891 German play, the show and catchy tunes are pure YA: love, sex, death, and grades. Go see it. Take the kids!

Maybe she's older than I thought

People's Leah Rozen on the new Nancy Drew movie: " . . . all that talk of Ned, roadsters and hunting for clues in abandoned mansions paled next to the thrill-filled young adult novels I was sneaking off my adolescent sister's bookshelf, like Johnny Tremain and Island of the Blue Dolphins."

Maybe they were on to something,

those YA writers
who made
spareness of line
look like
poetry.

The company Live Ink believes this in fact is a more efficient way to read prose. Look here to see what they've done with Moby-Dick.

And if you're not an English major?

The discussion about Shakespeare reminds me of something a friend of mine said she was going to do while taking some extended leave from employment: she was going to read Ulysses, because she thought it was something every educated person needs to have on their read-that list.

Maybe, if I'm on a very small, very deserted, Irish island, Ulysses might make its way on to my list--it's not that I'm planning not to read it, but the fact that I haven't doesn't make me feel incomplete. Time spent feeling guilty about the books you don't get to is time wasted not reading something else.

I wish (and maybe this could be my next job) high schools offered their seniors a class in Reading. Not literature (although I hasten to add that I think they should be studying that, too), but a class instead designed to demonstrate the breadth and methods of reading in one's life quite apart from the pursuit of educational degrees. The students would learn about the different genres of popular fiction, for example; cross gender boundaries by reading Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy; go on a field trip to a book store and library to learn how to browse. Slow readers could learn techniques for speeding up (if they so desired); grinds could be taught to relax; fluent readers could be challenged to stretch their preferences. Everybody would learn how to skim. Students could practice giving and receiving book recommendations. They could learn to give up on a book that isn't working for them and how to stick with something that might prove rewarding. You could survey magazines from Car & Driver to Granta; find out how to parse product manuals.

For me, gym class finally became almost bearable in twelfth-grade, when the emphasis shifted from team sports to what the teacher called "lifelong activities" like running, golf, and tennis. For all those people not going on for a B.A. in English, why can't we do the same for reading?

Cheap Thrills on the Moral High Ground

We were discussing Holocaust education on child_lit, and a member forwarded an outline of her temple's planned seventh-grade Holocaust unit, which included a showing of Schindler's List. The outline noted, parenthetically, that "sexual content will be edited out." I thought of that this weekend when Richard and I saw The Black Book, a racy thriller from the director of Basic Instinct about a Dutch Jewess who gets involved in the Resistance after she sees her family shot by Nazis. When the Resistance head insinuatingly asks our heroine how far she's prepared to go in pursuit of bringing down a powerful German commander, I fully expected her to answer "at least as far as Sharon Stone did," and sure enough, we see her bottle-blonding her pubes as well as her head. It's an awfully dumb (R and I are divided on whether this was intentional) movie, with improbable escapes, melodramatic music, and lots of shots of the heroine stealthily, perkily, cutting her eyes from side to side as she enters yet another forbidden room or darkened alley. Very Alias meets Perils of Pauline. And very teen-friendly with its surfeit of sex and flesh, furious brain-spattering gun battles and double-crossing action-packed plot--there's even a nod to teen movie classic Carrie in one of the heroine's more disgusting humiliations.

It's certainly not a learn-about-the-Holocaust movie in the way that Schindler's List was. But the flaw of that movie was the way it wore its virtue on its sleeve, and the way it seemed to applaud its viewers for watching it: I felt like I was being congratulated for being a Morally Serious Person Made Even Better for watching it. This heavy handedness is also what makes it a high-school required-viewing staple, because there's no chance kids will miss the message. Black Book offers the same message but, daringly or dumbly, packages it in an entertainment; Schindler's List feels more like going to church (irony acknowledged). Compare and contrast--there's a high school term paper I would have loved to write!

This time, it was a friend.

Editor Frances Foster called this morning to tell me that writer Janet McDonald died yesterday in Paris, her adopted home. I never met or even spoke with Janet, but my admiration for her books led to my interest in her writing something for the Horn Book, which led to one of the richest--and definitely the most riotous--files in my email archives. There was no joke she would dare not make, but unlike many funny people, she was just as appreciative of other's (mine, I mean) jokes as she was expert at making her own. After we had finished working on her Horn Book article, our correspondence continued, with sometimes a dozen emails in a day when I was allegedly working at home and she was up late in Paris, allegedly doing the same: "I need a new YA book idea and fast, now that I'm done with the one Frances was awaiting. Or how will I pay my rent? It's too hot to set up my Love Tent in the Bois de Boulogne next to the Brazilian trannies (plus, those gorgeous wenches would get much more traffic than me)." We talked gossip, politics, sex, aging, love troubles--books, rarely. In the past year, there were some breaks in our emails due to Janet's illness, which we both thought she'd beat--she told me about doing a victory dance with Kiley Minogue in the chemotherapy ward--but when I didn't hear from her for a good long time I knew it had come back. I'll really miss her.

Her books will remain a signal contribution to YA literature: smart, teen-intriguing tales set in the African American neighborhoods of the Bronx and Brooklyn, told by someone who really knew what she was talking about, and who knew that a situation was never enough; you need a story. And while Janet's books frequently deal in tough issues, plenty of her characters have a gift for backtalk that could have you, as Janet often said, "on tha flo'!" Her novel Off-Color will be published this November by Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kurt Vonnegut

has died, and Monica Edinger offers a brief tribute to his impact on her "arty and alienated" group of high school chums. I never "got" Vonnegut the way many of my friends did, but I can certainly appreciate the way he pushed at the boundaries of science fiction to make us rethink it and literature in general in more expansive terms.

I wrote an article for SLJ a hundred years ago about "cult novels," books that may or may not have had a wide audience but still seemed to speak to the kind of coteries Monica and I were both part of. They were books that made you and your friends feel like part of a special elect. Atlas Shrugged, Dune and The Lord of the Rings were big in that way; Monica also mentions Richard Brautigan, someone I remember Not Getting at all but I also knew he was Cool and therefore I should keep quiet. Who is speaking that way to teens today? Neil Gaiman is one I can think of, and I'm sure there is a whole canon of graphic novelists I just don't know. I could also see M.T. Anderson getting that kind of readership but wonder if being published as a YA writer hurts more than it helps. Part of the appeal of cult writers is that you discover them without the apparent aid of adults (but bless the librarians who put them in our way), and the fact that a YA novel says, de facto, this is for you, can work both for and against a book's appeal.

Flashcards, anyone?

Galleycat, home of the tall hotties, led me to a London Times story about ICUE, a U.K. company that offers electronic books for your cellphone (yes, yours, not mine). Apparently, one way to get around the small screen size is to use an option in the software that flashes one. word. at. a. time onto the screen. According to the Times:

Books can be read in four ways: as autocue-style text moving from right to left across the screen, a scrollable text block moving up and down, single words flashed up in quick succession, or a full page of text. “Teenagers prefer reading one word at a time, but most adults prefer the horizontal scrolling style,” [ICUE cofounder Jane] Tappuni said.

I suppose reading one-word-at-a-time is analogous to listening to an audiobook, but the thought gives me the jitters. Has anyone here tried it?

Where the world was as blue as an orange

If not the world, then the University of Illinois, where even the damned goldfish gracing the tank in the Illini Union come in the school colors. (As does this blog, I suddenly notice. It has to be the ugliest color combo I've ever seen, and now I know I'm going to see it everywhere.)

But last Friday the colors were accented with green, as the students celebrated Unofficial Saint Patrick's Day, wearing green hats and t-shirts and Mardi-Gras beads and getting drunk beginning at 7:30 AM when the bars opened. And this wasn't like skipping school and getting drunk; the whole idea was to get drunk and stay drunk during the whole day of classes. I saw one young woman getting arrested; a faculty member at the library school stumbled onto a passed-out student in the parking garage. And my speech entailed a bouncer at the door. My goodness--why couldn't they just get quietly stoned off their asses the way we did? (One of my college lit. professors, the late lamented Ellin Ringler, told us that was the best state in which to read The Waste Land.)

The speech went well, I thought, and you'll be able to decide for yourselves when it's published in the May issue of the Horn Book. I spoke (er, yammered) about the last forty years of YA literature and librarianship, starting with my own teen reading and ending with the Printz Award. I lunched with the youth services doctoral students and faculty from associated universities, spoke to a YA class, and got to spend a lot of time with my most esteemed friends and colleagues Betsy Hearne, Christine Jenkins, Deborah Stevenson and Boyd Rayward. (The first three you probably know from their publications in the Horn Book and elsewhere, the last is the world's leading expert on this guy.)

Blue and orange and green and vomit not withstanding, Illinois has one first-class library school. You should all go--and can, thanks to their LEEP program. I don't think there is any other school that has such an amazing confluence of faculty and resources, and such an array of interests and talents among its students.

A correction and a repeated complaint

Re the Printz Award: I posted a while back about how I thought American Born Chinese, published by First Second Books, was not exactly eligible for the award, since it did not seem to me to be expressly published for young adults, an explicit criterion. But I have since heard from the award Chair Cindy Dobrez, who explained to me all the evidence the committee took into account in deciding the book's eligibility. I'm convinced.

But while I'm again on the subject, let me whine just one more time about how wrongheaded this criterion is. By limiting the eligible pool to books designated by their publishers as being young adult books and specifically announcing that "adult books are not eligible," YALSA puts the job of determining what a young adult book is into the hands of publishers rather than those of librarians. It essentially limits eligibility to books published by juvenile publishing houses or divisions, as they are the only ones to give age designations to their books. It rewards a very specific (read: large) kind of trade publishing, as a small press does not have the kind of resources that would allow it to designate a book as young adult if it thought the book could reach an adult market as well.

What has always interested me about library work with young adults is the way it blends materials for children and those for adults in service to an audience poised between the two. But YALSA--which derives a lot more financial support from children's publishers than it does adult--has become too beholden to the juvenile end of things. The annual Best Books list became so disgracefully bereft of adult books that the organization had to add a whole new award program, the Alex Awards, to make up for it--rather than making Best Books the kind of "best of both worlds" list it should be. (It seems that whenever ALA's youth divisions are called out for overlooking one kind of book or another, the solution is found in creating yet another award.)

I think teens want to read adult books. Why don't we want to honor that?

If Anne Frank lived

I'm working this week on a speech about the shifting sands of YA literature (to be given at the Center for Children's Books on March 2, come on down) and the latest news about Anne Frank has me thinking about how central her diary has been to YA. Do you think we would have even had such a flourishing genre of Holocaust memoirs and novels had it not been for that book's impact? I wish someone more knowledgeable than I could tell us if, as I suspect, such books have a longer and richer history in YA and children's than they do in adult books. In this country, anyway--a colleague speculates that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas won more unreserved acclaim in the U.K. than it did here because our young readers expect more sophistication from books about the Holocaust.

The irony of the news of the Franks' attempt to emigrate to the U.S. is, of course, that if they had, there would be no Diary, and thus, no news.