Cindy:
Cinder (Feiwel, 2012), the first book in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. This futuristic Cinderella story is a mix of fairy tale, sci-fi, and romance — perfect for a wide female readership and certain to spark discussion and anticipation of future installments. Watch your back, Hunger Games, this series could be the next big thing. My second choice for mothers and daughters to read together would be Kekla Magoon’s 37 Things I Love (in no particular order) (Holt, 2012) for its honest first-person portrayal of a teenage girl’s coming of age as she deals with death, hope, love, and friendship.

Elissa:
Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming (Random/Schwartz and Wade, 2011). It’s suspenseful, informative, and accessible; readers will come away with a fresh view of the feisty, pioneering woman and the events leading up to — and following — her disappearance.

Kitty:
Libba Bray’s hilarious and sharply observant Beauty Queens (Scholastic, 2011). A planeload of beauty pageant contestants crashes on what looks like a deserted island. The scope of the plot is mind-boggling — the girls are ultimately pawns in a massive global conspiracy — but the quieter message about the power unleashed when teen girls think society isn’t watching will resonate across generations. Bray’s narration of the audiobook edition is a tour-de-force performance.

Katrina:
The mature topics in Girl in the Mirror (Persea, 2013) by Meg Kearney will appeal to older teens (and give mothers a jumping-off point for discussion), but it’s as much about mother-daughter bonds and connection to family — both adopted and birth in this case. Ideal for girls with adopted, single-parent, or other unconventional family backgrounds. Its verse narrative will likely be a new and exciting format for teens and moms to explore together.

Katie:
The women in Wren’s family manifest magical powers when they reach puberty. Wren uses hers to bring her boyfriend Danny back from the dead, but then meets (living) Gabriel, who’s drawn to her gift. Although romance takes center stage in Amy Garvey’s Cold Kiss (HarperTeen, 2011), Garvey weaves female familial relationships as intricately as Wren creates her spell. The complex dynamics between three generations of magical women (think a YA Practical Magic) add depth — and plenty for teen girls and their moms to discuss.

Martha:
How about A. S. King’s Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown, 2012)? Protagonist Astrid is taking a class in the Socratic method at her close-minded, small-town high school, and so she spends the year “asking questions and not rushing to answer them” — an illuminating time for her, and an ideal springboard for book discussion. Is she gay? Or just in love with one particular girl? Once she determines her identity, should she hide it, like her best friend? Astrid makes some pretty crucial choices in the book, and readers will be right there to see why, and how; through the interspersed airplane interludes (Astrid spends a lot of time looking up at the sky and sending questions and love to the passengers on airplanes) readers get glimpses into other lives, just as full of struggle and conflict and not-easy answers as Astrid’s life is. Finally, seeing as this is a mother/teen daughter read-together, Astrid’s relationship with her (nightmare of a) mother would certainly provoke discussion…

Roger:
I think Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity (Hyperion, 2012) would be an excellent choice; it’s the kind of YA book that makes a great adult crossover. While the story — a WWII thriller about two young women — is plenty exciting on its own, the narrative structure is tricky and would be fun to talk about.

Shara:
Pearl (called Bean) and her best friend Henry are comfortable with their respective familial dysfunctional in Pearl (Holt, 2011) by Jo Knowles, but the revelation of long-kept family secrets exposes the corrosive effect that silence can have on relationships. Homosexuality, friendship, and romance are just a few of the topics tackled by this dramatic novel.

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Perhaps no children’s book has been more subject to the corrosive influence of commerce than Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Its tangled publishing history features professional bullies more ruthless than Mr. McGregor (whose wife put Peter’s father in a pie) pursuing this hapless rabbit across time, committing acts of piracy, “copyfraud,” and criminally bad taste. Potter’s longtime publisher, Frederick Warne & Co., has joined their ranks, baking Peter into an unseemly sequel, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit (about which more later).

The bunnysploitation seems especially glaring in light of Potter’s unique gifts as writer and illustrator. Born in London in 1866, Potter was an assiduous student of animal anatomy and behavior from childhood on. She and her younger brother Bertram furnished their nursery with exotic pets, wild and domestic, bringing home mice, lizards, bats, frogs, birds, and, of course, rabbits. The children became determined amateur naturalists, documenting their finds in sketchbooks, never squeamish about studying dead specimens. (Indeed, when their captives succumbed, sometimes to rather outré diets, the young Potters would boil the skeletons and draw them as well.)

Beatrix carried her affections into adulthood: Potter scholar Judy Taylor once compiled a list of the author’s named pets throughout her life, tallying eighty-nine. Among them was the rabbit Benjamin Bouncer, who perished after breaking a tooth on hard candy. But he and his successor, the beloved Peter, lived long lives, providing ample opportunities to study their attitudes and habits.

With this intimate familiarity, Beatrix Potter became one of the finest observers of rabbits since Dürer. And not just rabbits: clothed or not, the mice, pigs, red squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, cats, foxes, and owls of her books are all true to life, animated by a keen eye for muscular and skeletal structure as well as by the common postures and characteristic movements she captured. Animals in her tales do fantastical things — mice embroider buttonholes; newt Sir Isaac Newton, clad in a species-specific “black and gold waistcoat,” dines on “grasshopper with lady-bird sauce” — but they do them plausibly. They are charming and convincing in large part because they are rendered naturalistically. This can be seen in all of her tales but also in a pen-and-ink drawing, the meditative masterwork “The Rabbit’s Dream” (c. 1899). A sleeping rabbit conjures itself under a counterpane in bed, surrounded by portraits of itself in over a dozen different positions — stretched on its side, prone with legs kicked back, with feet tucked under the body, with ears erect, ears folded back, ears parted over the shoulders, etc. A virtuosic performance, it remains among the most moving of Potter’s works, a testament to imagination enriched by experience.

Potter first told the story of Peter Rabbit in 1893 in a picture-letter sent to the bedridden son of her former governess. Its simple line drawings introduce the principals — Peter and his siblings; his mother; and his nemesis, Mr. McGregor — while its tiny tale of temptation and trial in an English garden unfolds in simple perfection. Several years later, she borrowed the letter back, expanded it, and, after failing to interest publishers in producing a small, affordable book with a single color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations (she felt color throughout was too expensive), printed it herself; it was snapped up by friends and relations. She quickly secured a contract with publisher Frederick Warne, agreeing to redo the illustrations in color.

The book proved an immediate success on publication in October 1902, rapidly selling out a first printing of eight thousand copies. “The public must be fond of rabbits!” Potter wrote to the youngest Warne brother, Norman (to whom she would be briefly engaged, before his untimely death in 1905); “what an appalling quantity of Peter.” To her dismay, the firm failed to register copyright in the United States, leading to piracies and loss of revenue. Although she helped save the company in 1917, after embezzlement by another Warne brother nearly bankrupted it, she scolded them on quality, condemning a copy of Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929 as “wretched.” She wrote sharply, “It is impossible to explain balance & style to people, if they don’t see it themselves.” While she enthusiastically crafted her own unique merchandise prototypes — including an extraordinarily soulful Peter Rabbit doll — she could have had no idea of the extent of commodification to come.

After Potter died in 1943 at the age of seventy-seven, Warne cast itself as the guardian of her legacy. But eventually the guardian began behaving badly, seeking to wring profits from its most famous long-eared property. In 1983, Warne was acquired by Penguin, itself owned by the international conglomerate Pearson, the largest book publisher in the world. Then, as scholar Margaret Mackey chronicles in The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children, Warne embarked on the expensive process of remaking printing plates for Potter’s books. While the new reproductions were a welcome improvement, Warne festooned them with what Mackey terms “aggressive” assertions of copyright, although Peter was already in the public domain. (In the UK, copyright protection lapsed but was then extended until 2013 when the European Union “harmonized” copyright law.) Warne seized on its “re-originated” illustrations to declare itself “owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations,” going so far as to attach a “tm” to the scampering Peter on the cover. Back in 1979, the publisher had sued a competitor, claiming trademark rights to eight images from Potter’s books that, it argued, were identified in the public mind with Warne alone. The case was settled out of court, but Viva R. Moffat, a legal scholar who teaches at the University of Denver, has called Warne’s claims (in a paper on “Mutant Copyrights”) a “stretch.”

Warne has applied for trademarks here and in the EU for every imaginable Peter Rabbit–related item that might feasibly be sold, from “books and texts in all media” to “toilet seat covers” and “meat extracts.” Moffat assails the practice of forcing trademarks to pinch-hit for lapsed copyright, while another legal expert, Jason Mazzone (who teaches intellectual property law at Brooklyn Law School), defines the placement of misleading warnings on public domain works as “copyfraud” in his book by the same name.

Warne’s zealous pursuit of its rights has not deterred it from crass acts of its own. In 1987, the same year it published its painstakingly remade edition, the firm allowed Ladybird Books, a purveyor of cheap paperbacks owned by the parent company, Pearson, to market The Tale of Peter Rabbit with bowdlerized text, eliminating Potter’s dry wit, dispensing with the pie made of Peter’s father (Mrs. Rabbit instead explains that Mr. McGregor just “doesn’t like rabbits”), and replacing Potter’s illustrations with photos of stuffed animals. Warne was excoriated in The Times of London, which condemned the new edition as “Hamlet without the ghost, Othello without the handkerchief.” Undaunted, a few years later Warne took out an advertisement in The Bookseller — “Peter Rabbit™ Packs a Powerful Punch” — threatening those who wandered into its garden with “expensive legal action” (see below).

The text of Warne’s advertisement asserting its legal rights to Peter Rabbit.

Now the firm has set its hobnailed boot upon Peter again, muddying the same waters it sought to protect:  publishing The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, a large-format sequel written by actress-celebrity Emma Thompson and illustrated by Eleanor Taylor, whose previous books include Go-Go Gorillas. The idea did not originate with Thompson. According to her, Warne solicited the sequel, sending her two half-eaten radishes and a note purportedly written by the Rabbit Himself. The story finds Peter once again in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch (ground already covered in Potter’s own sequel, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny), climbing into a picnic basket, and being carried off to Scotland, where frenetic adventures involving a giant black rabbit named Finlay McBurney ensue. Smarmy in tone, the text relies heavily on italics and typographical tricks to engender interest. Its author clearly knows little about rabbits, suggesting that Finlay’s mother goes about with her ears “tied in a neat knot.” (One hopes an impressionable toddler will not do the same to a pet.) Saddled with a thankless task, artist Taylor produces soft-focus brushwork that seems timid and amateurish, lacking Potter’s precision and authority, her unerring color sense, and her humor. Taylor’s Mrs. McGregor is copied from Potter’s privately printed original and is more appropriation than homage, while poor Finlay’s chest juts above his kilt like a pouter pigeon’s. Missing are Potter’s beautifully detailed portraits of flora and fauna, from the water beetle in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher to the Red Admiral butterfly in The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. No one, it seems, has done more to dilute Potter’s work than her own publisher.

Other ersatz sequels have proliferated recently, as publishing houses cash in on classics, from The Wind in the Willows to Winnie-the-Pooh to A Little Princess to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Indeed, there will be sequels to The Further Tale: Thompson has signed up for two more. Ultimately, such derivative stuff can’t harm the originals, just as a bad production of Shakespeare can’t touch the play itself. But sequels, it seems to me, are particularly confusing to the youngest readers, who are just developing notions of authorship. As the editor of the Library of America’s edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, I’ve been asked by children where the recent sequels, written by an heir who never met Wilder, came from. From someplace hotter than the Dakotas, I think.

What sets The Further Tale apart is that it presents inferior work to an audience of very young children who have not yet developed the intellectual capacity to distinguish between original and unoriginal text and art. In her discussion of the multiplicity of Peters, scholar Mackey quotes Margaret Meek’s essay on the profound influence of early encounters: “Children’s literature is undeniably the first literary experience, where the reader’s experiences of what literature is are laid down. Books in childhood initiate children into literature; they inaugurate certain kinds of literary competencies.” The competency that The Further Tale inaugurates is that of copying. It tells children, It’s acceptable to be unoriginal. It’s acceptable to exploit the work of others. And it’s acceptable — even desirable — to make money from that exploitation. This is being done in an era when publishing has been beset with scandals involving plagiarism and other unethical practices, the perpetrators of which are often young. With the model set by today’s publishers, this is hardly surprising. Perhaps Warne could learn a lesson from the original Peter: gluttony always leads to tears.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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1. Water in the Park is all about observation. What’s your favorite place to people- and animal-watch?

EJ: I live in Brooklyn and am fascinated by the huge variety of people in the city — people from all over the world — and by the texture and rhythms of the street life in my neighborhood. I wrote about it in Lemonade in Winter: A Book About Two Kids Counting Money (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 years) and the Invisible Inkling series (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 5–8 years) as well as in Water in the Park. The feeling of the neighborhood is very fundamentally American in that it’s the proverbial melting pot in action. People are mixed, racially and culturally and economically and spiritually, but we all go to the same park and the same corner shop, you know? It’s thrilling.

My own stoop is my favorite place to people- and animal-watch. There’s a woman who shelters all these rescue dogs down the block, and an aged greyhound with a perpetually bandaged hind leg. Also an enormous fluffy dog with a brown head that looks transplanted onto its white body. There’s a veteran who sweeps his walk in a haze of illegal-smelling smoke, a noisy French-speaking family, and an old lady who puts her Agatha Christie novels out on the street for people to take when she’s done with them.

2. How closely do you work with your illustrators? Did anything about Stephanie Graegin’s pictures for Water in the Park surprise you?

EJ: Sometimes I get to see sketches and dummies before a project goes to final art, and sometimes I don’t. As I’ve gotten to know certain illustrators, projects have come from a desire to work together. Small, Medium, Large: A Book About Relative Sizes (Star Bright, 3–5 years) was a book Tomek Bogacki and I put together ourselves. Paul O. Zelinsky and I are doing a Toys Go Out picture book that originated in some conversations we had while on tour.

With Stephanie Graegin, I didn’t see the work until it was completely finished, but I was freaking ecstatic with everything she did, especially the way she threaded characters and little narratives through a story that hardly identifies anyone but the dogs by name. There are so many personalities and little dramas on her pages. And she draws awesome babies.

3. Your book What Happens on Wednesdays, illustrated by Lauren Castillo (Farrar, 4–7 years), also deals with time and the progression of the day. Do you have daily routines or rituals?

EJ: I love community rituals that involve large meals and a million kids running around like lunatics, jacked up on sugar. Hanukkah parties, birthdays, Sunday dinners, I’’m your person. Then I declare myself exhausted and want to see nobody for weeks. As for daily rituals, I think I am more of an observer of how those rituals are important to children, and what they mean in the fabric of a family or neighborhood.

4. The pets in your books, such as Mr. Fluffynut and Little Nonny from Water in the Park and FudgeFudge and Marshmallow from That New Animal (Foster/Farrar, 4–7 years), have fantastic names. What’s the best pet name you haven’t used yet?

EJ: Thank you. The nefarious kitten Pumpkinfacehead in Toys Come Home (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 5–8 years) was just a typo that made me laugh, but the others I chose quite deliberately. Perhaps I should now push my imagination in another direction. I love that the tiger in Life of Pi is called Richard Parker. So: maybe a guinea pig called Louisa May Alcott. That makes me smile.

5. You’ve written picture book reviews for various publications. How does reviewing other people’s work inform your own creative process?

EJ: It forces me to think carefully about what I value in picture books, and about the relation of text and image. It helps me remember to leave room for an artist to fully illustrate my books. I don’t want the text to do all the work. Or even most of it. There needs to be room for pictures.

From the May 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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It was noticed — my imagination — and praised until I was nine or so, when my mother started rebuking me for having too much of it. Perhaps I’d provoked her, paradoxically, by wandering in my chatter too close to truths that needed to stay secret. Whatever her reason, this was a blow to me — an attack on my best protection, and my joy.

I could have given up right then and withered away, and might have if it hadn’t been for books. Whatever else my family’s faults, they read. My mother took me each week to the library, where I was encouraged to wander freely through the children’s room, choosing whatever pleased me. On one wall were picture books for little kids; on the other walls, the books with chapters — “real” books, to my mind, or what we now call middle grade books. I flew through those middle grade books, six or more a week, finding solace and hope.

Consider one of my favorite series, Mary Norton’s Borrower books, about people so tiny they could live under the floor, surviving on the gleanings of humans. Stacked matchboxes became a chest of drawers, a hatpin a weapon against threatening bugs, a potato enough food for weeks. What vast imaginations the Borrowers needed, to see a cutlery box as a possible boat, or a boot as a home. And even better — I understood this early on — what a vast imagination Mary Norton had needed to create the Borrowers. Or E. Nesbit the Psammead, Noel Streatfeild the Fossil sisters, C. S. Lewis the wardrobe, Norton Juster the tollbooth — the list was long and laden with riches.

My decision was made. Since splendid imaginings were too much for the real world, I threw in my lot with the authors and their creations, and stayed there until I grew up and no longer needed the shelter. By then, however, living without books had become impossible — the act of reading was as natural and essential to me as eating or sleeping. And so I read and read, and eventually I wrote a middle grade book of my own, but that is another story.

Not all children are treated as badly as I was, and for that we can be grateful. But all children have to work out the role of creativity, fantasy, and learning in their lives, often at the same age I was when books saved me — nine to twelve, the years for reading middle grade books. This is when children are moving toward an identity apart from their families but haven’t yet submerged themselves in peer groups. For these brief and wondrous years, they are individuals open to and ripe for the very best we can give them, including those books written just for them, books that invite them into the world outside their families, their schoolrooms, their own lives.

The list of middle grade books available these days is immeasurably longer and richer than when I was a child fifty years ago. Frank Cottrell Boyce, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo, Polly Horvath, Grace Lin, Hilary McKay, Louis Sachar, Laura Amy Schlitz, Jerry Spinelli, Rebecca Stead, N. D. Wilson, Lisa Yee — these are only some of the authors writing superb books for middle graders. Into the midst of such treasure, however, creeps a troubling trend. The immense success of young adult books, written for teens and known to everyone as YA, has been overshadowing the quieter middle grade category and, in some cases, threatening to subsume it.

For example, a list of “The Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature,” published online by The Atlantic Wire in 2012, was made up almost entirely of middle grade stalwarts like Meg Murry, Harriet M. Welsch, Claudia Kincaid, and, even worse, those marvelous young girls our seven- and eight-year-olds read about: Ramona Quimby and Pippi Longstocking. I’m happy to say that a great outcry ensued, leading to a mea culpa from The Atlantic Wire, plus an excellent discussion of what exactly YA is (among other things, books written about and for teens, not children). Another example: a 2012 NPR online poll, “Best-Ever Teen Novels? Vote for Your Favorites,” got into a mess when it — correctly — rejected all the votes for middle grade books. Much complaining followed, which led to further explanations, which led to…more complaining. And still the mix-ups come, though not all are so public. Just ask any middle grade writer when was the last time he or she had to run the so-you-write-YA gauntlet. Then hold onto your hat.

Some of this confusion is understandable. Long before YA was dreamt of (most say sometime in the sixties), children’s books were written in which the characters grew from childhood into adolescence and even adulthood. To name a few: Little Women, the Anne of Green Gables series, the Betsy-Tacy series, and the Little House series. So should we now re-categorize them as YA? No. The children’s book world, if not the general public, is certain of that. Those books were written for children, are safe and appropriate for children, and would probably bore the socks off any teenager reading them for reasons other than a nostalgic return to her own childhood. Then there’s the more recent Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling’s behemoth, which brought on further category confusion by starting out in middle grade, then aging into YA as Harry himself aged into adolescence. On top of all that, not only is there the sad fact that middle grade is not as snappy and memorable a term as YA, it is also too often seen as a synonym for middle school, which is another thing altogether.

So is all this confusion really a problem? Does it matter? Not in terms of teens or adults reading children’s books, or even of children reading YA books (the less sexual and violent ones, that is). But in terms of maintaining the boundaries of the middle grade category — so that children know where to go for books that address their particular lives — it matters a great deal. Not just to the children who are, like I was, unprotected and floundering, desperately in need of an imagination-filled haven. No, it matters to all children. As Monica Edinger wrote in response to the NPR brouhaha (“Stop Calling Books for Kids ‘Young Adult,’” November 2012 on the Huffington Post), “Those adults who enjoy reading young adult books today like to reminisce about their favorite teen reads. But when they include children’s books among them and call them YA, they are marginalizing the true readership of these books. My fourth grade students are children. They are not young adults.” Exactly. And, besides, claiming Ramona for YA is like your older sister borrowing your favorite sweater to go out with her boyfriend while you have to stay home with the babysitter. It’s just not right.

Those of us who write middle grade books are a proud bunch, certain that our work is important, that we’re building lifelong readers, maybe even saving lives. And we’re absolutely certain that we’re not a part of YA. Please help us keep the boundaries high and childhood safe for children. They need it, and we owe it to them.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Table of Contents

 

		Features
Caroline Fraser	10	Peter Rabbit and the Tale of a Fierce Bad Publisher The bunnysploitation of a children’s literature icon.
Jeanne Birdsall	27	Middle Grade Saved My Life In praise of middle grade novels—and why not to confuse them with YA.
Jonathan Hunt	31	The Amorphous Genre Needed: a gateway drug for nonfiction.
		Columns
Roger Sutton	7	Editorial Everybody Wants to Be a Teenager Has contemporary YA literature outgrown our caretaking?.
Karen Jameyson	16	Foreign Correspondence Jeannie Baker: Mirror, Mirror… The hows and whys of a remarkable cross-cultural picture book
Kathleen T. Horning	35	Caldecott at 75 Madeline’s Rescue and the Question of Audience Third in a series on the Caldecott Medal at seventy-five—one winner per decade, here the 1950s.
Marc Tyler Nobleman	43	The Writer’s Page Danger! Dialogue Ahead Should nonfiction authors let their subjects speak for themselves?
Katrina Hedeen and Rachel L. Smith	48	What Makes a Good…? What Makes a Good YA Love Story?
	111	From The Guide Graphic Novels for Children A selection of reviews from The Horn Book Guide.
Raina Telgemeier	120	Cadenza Retitled In a word, touchstone novels get title updates.
		Reviews
	55	Book Reviews
		Departments
	4 5 113 118 119	Letters to the editor May/June Starred Books Impromptu Index to Advertisers Index to Books Reviewed
		Cover from Mirror. © 2010 by Jeannie Baker. Reproduced by permission of the publishers, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, London.

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Not here. While I’m firmly in favor of the right of people of any age to read up, down, or sideways as they choose, here at the Horn Book we like to think there is a bright line between publishing for adults and publishing for kids, defined as people of an age between birth and high school graduation. In no small part, we like to think this because it makes our work easier. But, like Jeanne Birdsall, I believe the line has value, too.

I came into librarianship more than thirty years ago as a YA librarian. Young adult literature was an almost completely different animal then. The books were shorter, the protagonists younger; sex might be happening, but it was off the page. (Judy Blume’s Forever is the big exception, but Forever was published, nominally, as an adult book.) You might have seen some four-letter words, but you’d never find a fuck on the first pages as you do at the beginning of Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, a YA novel that gets a starred review this month. Thirty years ago, YA books were labeled “12 and up,” and, as these things usually go, they were mostly being read by ten- to thirteen-year-olds. The first “14 and up” I can remember seeing was Margaret Mahy’s The Catalogue of the Universe, and now that age range is the rule.

Do you ever wonder if 14 and up, sometimes way up, should still be our job? Martha Parravano, the other day, was going through a book cart of new ARCs when she literally threw up her hands in submission to the lineup of fat, glossy YA novels. Their size, their number, their…perfectly respectable selves. I say “perfectly respectable” because the professionalism of these books is not in question, from jacket design on in to the catchy stories, fluid writing, and vivid characters (see Katrina Hedeen and Rachel L. Smith’s “What Makes a Good YA Love Story?” for a consideration of a baker’s dozen of excellent books showing just one slice of YA lit). But the fact that there is so much of it presents a question for everybody in the business of books for young people. Has contemporary YA lit outgrown our caretaking? And forget their staggering numbers: why are novels for people old enough to vote even our business? Bowker’s recent “Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age” report revealed that it is adults, not teens, who buy most YA books, and those adults are buying them for their own reading pleasure. By and large, however, YA books are published by the children’s divisions of their publishers. Eleanor & Park is published by St. Martin’s Griffin, one of the very few cases I can think of where YA, labeled as such, comes from an adult trade division. I wonder if more of the grownups should be taking on their share.

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to Be a Teenager appeared first on The Horn Book.

It’s a special honor to speak with adults who are as committed as I am to bringing books and children together. I am a mother and have been a daycare provider and a middle-school teacher…and I can tell you that the most magical moments I have experienced with children have been with books.

We all know how critical books are to the development of reading in a child. A good book and the joy it provides is often the reason a child is motivated to become a reader in the first place. Language is fun. Imagination is fun. And when a child experiences the joy of reading with a childcare provider or teacher, he or she is encouraged to take that next step and become a reader. And we all know that readers thrive, while non-readers fall behind in this world of the written word.

However, what I really want to remind you of is this: when you read with a child, you are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. You are doing a much more powerful thing, and it is something that we are losing, as a culture. By reading with a child, you are teaching that child to be human. When you open a book, and share your voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I will go further and say that that child learns to feel the world more deeply, and the child becomes more aware of himself and others in a way that he simply cannot experience except in your lap, or in your classroom, or in your reading circle.

When we read books with children, we share other worlds, yes, but more importantly, we share ourselves. Reading with children makes an intimate, human connection that teaches that child what it means to be alive as one of many live beings on the planet. We are teaching empathy. We are naming feelings, expressing experience, and demonstrating love and understanding…all in a safe environment. When we read a book with children, then children – no matter how stressed, no matter how challenged – are drawn out of themselves to bond with other human beings, and to see and feel the experiences of others.

I believe it is that moment that makes us human. In this sense, reading makes us human.

The world can be a scary place. It can be a scary place for adults, but it is often worse for children. Children experience homelessness, hunger, abuse, and neglect. They can’t get in a car and leave a situation that they find challenging or displeasing. They can’t choose their own lifestyles. Children have very little control over their own lives. Children have to go where they are told and do what they are told to do, often with no apparent justification. They feel powerless. And the truth is, they often are powerless.

So, how do we help those small, often powerless people to grow up to feel strong and confident in this crazy world? How are our children going to feel safe? This happens when we teach children to love themselves, and to understand that there are other people who love them, too. Children need to feel that they are part of a loving, empathetic unit.

A child with a strong emotional center doesn’t hurt other children. It is the damaged child, the wounded child, who lashes out. And a damaged, wounded child grows to be a damaged, wounded adult unless he learns to soothe himself and feel safe in this world.

There are people on the planet who are incapable of empathy. But for most of us, empathy is learned. We learn it as children. Empathy is what keeps us from hurting each other on the playground, from cutting each other off on the highway, and from committing acts of terror and horror on other human beings. When we understand what makes us function, we can understand other people. When we understand that no matter how badly we feel, someone else may be feeling badly, too, we are able to step back and care for others. That is what living in a society is all about.

So, you are saying to yourselves: that’s a big job! And yes, it is. We teachers and caregivers can’t do all of it; parents have to do it, too. Society must also do it. But we can do our part, and here’s a really good way to go about it:

Sit down, put a child on your lap, and read a story. Have fun. Read in character. Use funny voices. Ask questions. Laugh and cry. Be human and be strong, and that will allow the children in your care to be human and be strong. And, they will also learn how to read.

Thank you.

This speech was delivered at the Fostering Lifelong Learners conference held on April 25, 2013 at the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more from the conference, click here.

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Kitty Flynn, Lolly Robinson, and Martha Parravano discuss what works–and what doesn’t–in picture books for preschoolers.

From Dr. Robert Needlman explaining the difference between babies falling asleep and learning how to go to asleep, through Cambridge librarians Julie Roach and Beth McIntyre coaching us through selecting books for preschool story time to Anna Dewdney using photographs to demonstrate how to transform unpleasant expressions on family members faces into picture book gold, our Fostering Lifelong Learners event yesterday with Reach Out and Read and the Cambridge Public Library was a great success. The day was a little long but I learned a ton, and several attendees told us they got lots of good, practical ideas to use in their libraries and classrooms right away. We’ll be sharing some of the day with you next week, including Anna Dewdney’s inspirational speech, which she is graciously allowing us to publish on hbook.com. Julie Roach and I are already talking about what to do next year.

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Roger Sutton welcomes participants to the Fostering Lifelong Learners conference

The Doctors Panel: Dr. Robert Needlman, Dr. Lisa Dobberteen, Dr. Marilyn Augustyn

The Publishers Panel: Kathryn Bhirud (Penguin), Nancy Tran (DK), Megan Quinn (Charlesbridge)

The Critics Panel: The Horn Book’s Kitty Flynn, Lolly Robinson, Martha V. Parravano

Kitty Flynn perusing Gideon & Otto

Julie Roach, Cambridge Public Library Youth Services Manager, performing a read-aloud

Cambridge children’s librarian Beth McIntyre

Roger and company engage in small-group work

The Educators Panel: Anne MacKay, BB&N School, and Jim St. Claire, Amigos School

Dr. Kathy Modigliani, Family Childcare Project

Anna Dewdney, the Llama Lady

Author Anna Dewdney (left) and two Llama Llama fans

Author Stuart J. Murphy and a fan

Dr. Robert Needlman and Jackie Miller from Reach Out and Read

Two readers in action

Pictures from the Fostering Lifelong Learners conference. Photos by Shara Hardeson. For more on the day-long event, click here.

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I met Elaine several times, first when she gave a dynamite speech about censorship at the University of Chicago when I was a student, and last when she gave another dynamite speech upon receiving the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion in 1998. An acute critic, she was one of the few writers for children  who I thought could do an equally good job on our side of the fence. She had a big Carol Burnett smile and was always the most stylishly dressed person in the room. That goes for her prose, too.

Elissa has collected some of Konigsburg’s Horn Book moments.

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