Middle grade fiction saved Jeanne Birdsall’s life. Here’s how Birdsall’s Penderwicks books helped save two of her fans.

The first time we listened to The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, we were fleeing Hurricane Irene. Traffic was backed up on the road out of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and I was running out of ways to entertain my five-year-old daughter. I had checked out the audiobook to reacquaint myself with the Penderwicks before reading the next book in the series for our statewide mock Newbery program, and I suspected the writing might be a bit advanced for Ella, but I thought I’d give it a shot. There was always the youngest Penderwick, four-year-old Batty, to keep her interested.

When we arrived at our friends’ house four hours later, Ella wanted to head directly to the guest room and finish listening to the book right then. Odd, I thought, but I went along with it. Two days later, on the drive home, she wanted to hear it again. And then again the next day. And the next. Soon she wanted to hear the other two Penderwick audiobooks. It wasn’t long before we were listening to all three volumes in rotation, everywhere we went, at all times of day and night. Our dial was permanently set on Radio Penderwick. Rosalind, Skye, Jane, Batty, and Hound were our non-corporeal companions as we ate silent dinners à deux.

For the first few weeks it was funny, but I thought it was a phase that would pass in its own time. After another month, it was definitely strange. Three months in, I thought I would go batty myself if I had to hear the saga of the Penderwicks one more time. Ella’s devotion to the books showed no sign of abating, though, and gradually my resistance wore away. After six months, I had to admit that I was as attached to them as she was.

If there had been another adult in the house at the time, the level of Penderwickitude might have been curbed, but there wasn’t. Ella’s father and I were in the middle of a divorce, and we were sharing custody of our child. During my custodial weeks, our little household consisted of only Ella, myself, and our fat orange cat. It made for a stark contrast to the boisterous Penderwick house, with its merrily squabbling sisters and scores of family friends. I think that rosy ideal of family togetherness is part of what attracted Ella and me to the books, but it’s not what kept us listening.

There is, after all, an aching absence at the center of the Penderwick family. The girls’ beloved mother died of cancer four years before the events of the first book. The spirit of the late Elizabeth Penderwick overlays everything in Jeanne Birdsall’s fictional world. It lends depth to the family’s joys and keeps them from ringing false to the reader. This is a family that loves fiercely — that clings tightly to one another because they know firsthand the impermanence of life and love.

When I speak to adults about the importance of reading aloud, I always tell them that children are capable of comprehending spoken language at a far higher level than they are able to read on their own. That is, of course, why we should keep reading to our children long after they learn to read for themselves. After our year with the Penderwicks, however, I’m convinced that there’s another piece to the puzzle. I think children’s capacity to understand the emotional content of fiction is much more sophisticated than we often give them credit for. I think the Penderwicks were giving my daughter the tools she needed to work through the sadness at the heart of her own family.

It would be nice if bibliotherapy were an exact science. Book plus reader equals recovery and psychological health. Has your child lost a grandparent? Read dePaola’s Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs. Dead pet? Here’s Viorst and Blegvad’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. In reality, the process is much messier. It’s not that books don’t have the power to heal the human heart. Of course they do. Few of us would be in this business if we didn’t think so. The process is more like medieval alchemy than modern chemistry, though, and none of us has the philosopher’s stone.

My daughter and I don’t listen to our Penderwicks as often these days. Our little family has adjusted to its new shape, and we’ve moved on to other titles. Young Fredle, by Cynthia Voigt, is a current favorite. When Ella goes to sleep, though, she still likes to do so in the company of our favorite Massachusetts family, and now and then we still dine al Penderwick. Even if we outgrow the books completely one day, though, we owe a permanent debt of gratitude to Jeanne Birdsall. Her words are the refiner’s fire that helped turn our leaden hearts to gold.

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1. You were a book reviewer before you were a parent. How has the first job helped with the second?

Two words: review copies. After umpteen years of working at the Horn Book, I’ve amassed a pretty good and varied collection of children’s books. We’re never at a loss for something to read, and thankfully both kids love books (coincidence? Maybe, but having tons of books all over the house doesn’t hurt). There have been more than a few times that I’ve come upon one or both kids sitting (quietly!) and looking at a book—and that’s just the kind of help I need.

2. And how has the second job helped with the first?

Being a parent has and hasn’t informed my job as a book reviewer. What each of my kids likes is not an indicator of what other kids will like or of what makes an outstanding book. For example, Chloe can’t get enough of Blue’s [as in Clues] Sleepover Party, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it to anyone else (unless that person deserves it).

I do like having my own captive audience to test drive reading books aloud, which helps a lot with reviewing picture books. And when they were infants, I even read some novels aloud to them—working and bonding at the same time!

Living with young children has allowed me to see childhood from a different angle. I recently reviewed Ole Konnecke’s Anton and the Battle, which I think captures perfectly how a four-year-old (boy, especially) thinks and plays. At one point in their proverbial pissing match, Anton and his frenemy, Luke, pretend to throw bombs at each other. I would have liked this book BC (before children), but I wouldn’t have had a clue how completely on-target the cartoony pretend-violent play is.

3. You have two preschoolers, a girl and a boy. Do you see any gender stereotyping in their book preferences?

My first reaction to this is that their preferences have more to do with their interests and temperaments than with their gender, but who knows? Jakob likes information and has a lot of patience; he’ll listen to a 128 page book about space if someone is willing to read it to him. He also likes fiction and nonfiction books about dinosaurs, construction, knights, firefighters, and other typical little boy topics, but he doesn’t limit himself to those things. If someone is reading a book, he’ll usually sit and listen, no matter what it’s about.

Chloe isn’t girly at all—she won’t look at a dress; her favorite color is black—but she does gravitate toward fiction rather than her big brother’s information books. She loves Curious George (like any self-respecting three-year-old), Leslie Patricelli’s board books, and any book with Humpty Dumpty in it. She likes folktales; Feodor Rojankovsky’s The Tall Book of Nursery Tales has been at the top of her morning story time pile for a few months now.

4. What are their current favorites?

Chloe and Jakob

Their favorites change from day to day, week to week. I asked this morning and they both said, “That superheroes book with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman [a.k.a. DC Super Heroes Storybook Collection].” Last week the answer would have been, “Traction Man!” (that’s Traction Man Is Here by Mini Grey). They were obsessed with that book for a few days. We read it over and over; we acted out the story (with improvised Traction Man outfits and a pet scrubbing brush); we made a special trip to the library to borrow the other two TM books. But this week Traction Man is off the radar. Jakob has been studying The Usborne Official Knight’s Handbook. Chloe wants us to read “Puss in Boots” (and only “Puss in Boots”) from Anne Rockwell’s collection, Puss in Boots and Other Tales.

Oh, and I probably shouldn’t admit this, but for the last year (or maybe it just feels like a year), Jakob’s #1 favorite? The thirty-two page 2012 Playmobil toy catalog.

 5. What, in your opinion, is the most misguided choice for a baby shower book?

Along with a Playmobil catalog, any book that speaks more to new parents and their experiences/wishes/hopes than to a baby or a child…that is if the gift giver’s intention is really and truly to give the baby a gift. I’m sure many parents would like those books’ sentiments (in fact, I know many parents do like them), but kids themselves won’t give a poopy diaper about them.

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2013, for a big day focused on the littlest people.

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When my children were young, I was happy to follow my mother’s lead and not keep books by gender or level or topic. Each of my four children had his or her favorites, and a few, very tattered, books were adored by everyone. When the kids were all younger than ten they moved fluidly among picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, and nonfiction of all kinds.

Harry Potter was the start of the trouble. My oldest discovered Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone when she was in fourth grade and her youngest sister was just learning to walk. The books quickly became favorites that we passed around and discussed at dinner. We invented yard Quidditch for birthday parties and knitted hats for the house-elf rebellion. By the time the long-awaited final book was announced seven years later, my youngest, Madelaine, was dying to get in on the game, and being read to was not good enough. She wanted to read the last book for herself. Furthermore, she decided to read all six of the previous books in her second-grade year before the last book came out in the summer. I was all for the project, excited to see her so motivated, proud that she was reading independently — and yet, there were problems I didn’t foresee.

A five-pound book doesn’t fit the standard second-grader backpack, and it’s a lot to carry when you only weigh forty pounds. Madelaine enjoyed each book and loved being up to speed on all the characters her siblings had been talking about her whole life. Still, it took her so long to read them, as a new reader, that much of the momentum of the stories were lost in the work of decoding, so she never found them as exciting as the older kids had. Because the characters were many years older than she was and often focused on things that didn’t interest her, she never made an emotional connection with them, either. But she was keeping up with the big kids, and that was all she wanted.

On the midnight of the final Harry Potter release, all six of us went to our neighborhood indie, Annie Bloom’s, for the party. The kids were eight, eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. We bought one book and six bookmarks. We made the usual bargain about not talking about what happens until everyone’s bookmark passed that chapter — a good incentive for not hogging the book. It was a magical week that July when we all shared our long-awaited Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!

And yet I found my own enjoyment of the book lessened because Deathly Hallows was such a dark story—not inappropriately dark, but grim reading for a child who had just lost her first tooth. From my tree-house office that week I watched Madelaine as she read aloud to our chickens. Periodically, she would slam the book shut and say to them, in complete earnestness, “This is one of the awful parts. I’m not going to read it to you. You’re only four months old. Maybe later — when you are big enough to lay eggs.” And then she would go curl up with her big brother in the hammock and work her way through the “awful part.” She managed. We all did, and, as with all the other books, there was yard Quidditch to play and inside jokes to tell and lots of meaty topics to discuss. My youngest did not suffer nightmares, as I had feared. But I did find some unanticipated consequences to letting her read up.

Not surprisingly, it took Madelaine the entire school year to read the first six Harry Potter books, which meant she read no picture books in second grade. Many of the really great picture books are for school-aged children. Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges, The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base, and The Cats in Krasinski Square by Karen Hesse were favorites of my older children. She also missed out on Encyclopedia Brown and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and My Father’s Dragon. The first Clementine book by Sara Pennypacker came out that year, and I was longing to have someone just the right age with whom to share it. But it’s not so easy to go back to simpler books when you’ve spent a year filling up on richer fare. Madelaine’s reading improved tremendously in terms of both speed and comprehension, and of all the benefits of reading up, that’s by far the most immediately valuable. And yet I’m sorry to see that the classic characters from longer picture books and early chapter books are not part of the architecture of her imagination in the way they are for me and for her older siblings.

Now that my oldest two are in college and the younger girls are in middle- and high school, I’ve been rethinking my laissez-faire approach to reading up. For instance, my younger two often find YA books a little bit stale. John Green, whom they used to love when they were in grade school, seems a little silly to them now. And that’s a shame. It’s not that the books are lacking in any way. But as precocious readers, they took only a shallow spoonful of what was available in the text. If they were of a temperament to reread favorite books, they might have come to appreciate his work more fully in time. But they chose to move on, remembering the fun of their shared jokes from An Abundance of Katherines but not the substance they glossed over at the time.

There’s a lot of really great YA writing that my girls won’t touch because it seems too young. The writing is right on target for them developmentally, but because they’ve already read extensively in the genre, it simply doesn’t appeal to them in the way I’d hoped it would. In the last few years they have gravitated toward genres they didn’t read in grade school: steampunk, graphic novels, and fan fiction. Overall, though, they spend less time reading than their older siblings did.

Reading up is not as simple an issue as I’d once supposed. I’ve noticed a tendency among people in the book professions to scorn parents who advocate withholding older books from younger readers, painting them as rigid, conservative, and insensitive to the needs of the child. I thought so myself at the start, but now I have some sympathy for the longer view of trying to nurture a lifelong reader and not just a temporarily precocious one.

I’m happy to report that my younger girls do find YA books they like from time to time. They discovered Terry Pratchett at exactly the right moment and are avid fans. Fortunately, their older brother and sister remember the fun of shared reading enough to give The Wee Free Men a try, even though it’s “too young” for them. Now when everyone is home from college and they’re all making dinner together, they are full of inside jokes from the Discworld and have loud arguments in Nac Mac Feegle about whether the recipe calls for Special Sheep Liniment!

I have always thought that the social dimension of reading gets the short end of the stick in our current educational climate, one that puts so much emphasis on measurable results. In my opinion, the conversations that occur because of the book are far more valuable than anything on the page. So do I regret letting my younger two read YA books so early? No, not exactly; but I do recognize that they lost something in their childhood reading that I cannot now replace. It’s true that Madelaine, in a moment of rainy-day boredom, recently picked up Clementine and gave it a read, trumpeting the funny bits out loud as my kids often do. Those funny bits were still pretty funny, even from the lofty view of sixth grade. Clementine could have been a literary soul mate to my quirky and keenly observant girl. But that ship sailed years ago during her Harry Potter summer, and she and Clementine will be only passing acquaintances.

On the other hand, my kids feel a deep and lasting camaraderie over their shared reading, even as school and college and adult life pull them in different directions. They have grown apart in their talents and aspirations. They have their own circles of friends and will probably never all live in the same town again. And yet I do hope that the stories they loved together will be their common ground, just as Narnia and Earthsea and Middle-earth are the childhood homes my own siblings and I continue to share.

From the November/December 2012 Horn Book Magazine.

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Emily Post was the guardian of etiquette for decades, and now her descendents Peggy Post (Emily’s great-granddaughter-in-law) and Cindy P. Senning (Peggy’s sister-in-law) cover the genteel beat, making their book Emily’s Everyday Manners a tempting choice for teachers of manners. It is filled with practical advice about everyday situations that children encounter, such as playing on a playground, attending a birthday party, or riding the school bus. The book’s characters demonstrate good manners through sample phrases they might use in specific situations. Unfortunately the whole thing backfires because the words coming out of the kids’ mouths are so very unchildlike. For instance, while washing the dishes little Emily says to little Ethan, “Thanks! My mom so appreciates the help.” At best, these kids come across like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver; at worst, their adult-sounding comments would probably elicit real-life teasing from other children.

One old favorite to ease grownups and kids alike into the subject of manners is Sesyle Joslin’s classic What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions. The book, which adults may remember from their own childhoods, features delightfully imaginative and childlike scenarios such as this: “You are walking backwards, because sometimes you like to, and you bump into a crocodile. What do you say, dear?” A page turn reveals the answer: “Excuse me.” The accompanying illustrations by Maurice Sendak are very funny, with many of his characteristic touches (e.g., child characters wearing outsize dress-up clothes, a dog craning to lick a wedding cake). Not surprisingly, however, the book is of its time; the little girl plays at being a princess needing rescue, a bride, and other very traditional gender roles that may set off sexism alarm bells. Likewise, the firearm will probably rule it out for use in school, but the scenario makes its point perfectly: “You are a cowboy riding around the range. Suddenly Bad-Nose Bill comes up behind you with a gun. He says, ‘Would you like me to shoot a hole in your head?’ What do you say, dear? ‘No, thank you.’”

What Do You Say, Dear? works so beautifully as a manners book because it’s genuinely funny to both adults and children. It’s also participatory — the child is expected to fill in the answer before turning the page. The book doesn’t lecture children or put unrealistic-sounding words in their mouths. Rather, it gives kids practice with good-manners words so that they may, if backing into a crocodile (or a grandma) in the grocery store, spontaneously come up with the just right thing to say.

Another book an older generation might remember fondly is Munro Leaf’s Manners Can Be Fun. It begins by making the point that “good manners is really just getting along well with other people.” Updated several times since 1936 when originally published, it relies heavily on name-calling, describing children such as “BRAGGER” (“who tells you all the time how great he is”) and “SHOW-OFF” (“who is miserable if everybody isn’t paying attention to her”). The tone is very much that of an adult instructing a child—you can practically see the finger-wagging. The stick-figure illustrations are comical, but overall the book lacks the grace both in writing and illustration of Leaf’s classic Story of Ferdinand.

An entertaining book that melds old-fashioned sensibility with a modern-day twist is Diane Goode’s Mind Your Manners! The text comes from an 1802 spelling book designed to instruct children on etiquette. Still-useful tips include, “Throw not any thing under the table,” “Drink not, nor speak with any thing in thy mouth,” and “Eat not too fast, or with greedy behavior.” Rich watercolor and ink illustrations show the nineteenth-century Abbott family sitting at a long table — and breaking each of the book’s etiquette rules in turn. Goode skillfully conveys humor with a swoop of a line and a squiggle of black ink; readers who carefully pore over the pictures will be rewarded with lots of funny details. Interplay between the text’s heavy-handedness and the illustrations’ humor provides a great opportunity for discussing, with a light touch, current expectations for good manners.

Some books are fine stories on their own that also happen to cover manners. One is Cari Best’s Are You Going to Be Good?, about a little boy who tries his very hardest to be polite at his great-grandmother’s 100th birthday party. Young Robert rejoices in attending this most special occasion, looking very proud in his suit and tie, with newly polished shoes. He’s also all prepped with his manners: “In the car, they practice ‘Please.’ They practice ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ too.” G. Brian Karas’s pictures hilariously convey both Robert’s ebullience (which would seem to present a challenge to all those expectations of behavior) and his sudden shyness at being faced with a roomful of tall, dressed-up adults. This isn’t a book about a perfect child but one who is trying hard, and in the end he and Great-Gran Sadie get into some welcome mischief. This book could be a wonderful way to prepare children for an important event, for it models not just child behavior but also compassionate, wise adult behavior (sometimes we need a little reminding, too).

Another picture book that is strong in its own right and happens to have some good pointers about manners is Thank You, Meiling, by Linda Talley. Little duck Meiling is behaving much in the way a spoiled human child would. Her mother reprimands her and sends her to run errands with a little boy: “You shall go with him. If you pay attention, you may learn something about courtesy. Remember, stop and think of others.” The duck takes her mission seriously, noticing each polite phrase or action as she and the boy gather items for the Moon Festival. The story is engaging, the Moon Festival traditions enticing, and the manners are clearly portrayed as being more than mere custom but rather a way of taking care of others.

Author Judy Sierra shows a particular affinity for picture books about manners. Her most recent, Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners, depicts a little girl who goes to the grocery store and encounters a dinosaur. The pair copes with a number of etiquette questions, all posed in rhyme, as when the dinosaur wants to turn down an offer of butter brickle: “She does not want it, even slightly. / How does she let you know politely?” The question-and-answer format recalls What Do You Say, Dear? but with an updated look and tone. Tim Bowers’s illustrations portray the dinosaur with a tiny pink purse and glasses, watched by wary-looking humans as she shops. The book combines humor with instruction, as does Sierra’s Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf, in which a dapper-looking wolf heads off to a party at the library while trying to remember his instructions: “Sip your tea and never slurp, say ‘Excuse Me’ if you burp. / Smile and have a lot of fun, but don’t go biting anyone!” Fairy-tale characters populate J. Otto Seibold’s digital illustrations, and kids will enjoy finding the ones they know while they follow B.B. Wolf’s attempts at staying polite.

Since the reason for having good manners is to get along well with others, and each of Mo Willems’s books gets down to the fundamentals of the way people (and elephants, piggies, pigeons, ducklings, and others) relate to one another, it’s not surprising that he, too, has written some manners books. Time to Say “Please”! offers advice to a little girl who is eyeing a cookie jar so longingly that her eyes turn into cookies. The words of wisdom are presented by cute little mice, industriously using balloons, signs, parachutes, and other things to show the information: “Don’t just grab it! Go ask a big person and PLEASE say ‘PLEASE’!” The mice continue to list other reasons to say please, and some other useful phrases, too, all delivered with humor and practicality: “You may not get what you want. But it’s hard to say ‘no’ to ‘please.’”

Willems’s newest Pigeon book, The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? also features manners and cookies. Pigeon cannot believe that adorable little Duckling has somehow gotten hold of a cookie simply by asking for it. After Pigeon reels off the many things he himself requires, a tear drops from his eye: “But do I get what I ask for?” A double-page-spread Pigeon-tantrum ensues: “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” He is finally shamed into politeness by the duckling’s kind offer of the cookie. An adult looking for the perfect book to teach a rude child manners may prefer a protagonist without so much attitude, but children will get the point through Pigeon’s own bad behavior.

For those still on their way to Willems there are even some board books intended to teach manners to the very youngest. Manners Time, by Elizabeth Verdick, gives kids not just the words to say but the accompanying physical cues. In one example a little girl offers salad to her friend, and the text reads, “Here’s a nice way to say no: ‘No, thank you.’ (A smile helps, too.)” Changes in typeface help identify the message, with the spoken phrase printed in a different color. The illustrations by Marieka Heinlen show a diverse group of kids with a range of expressions that make meaning clear while not stooping to the cartoony or exaggerated. This book could be used with toddlers as well as with older kids who need some help with social cues, and it also includes some thoughtful tips for parents and caregivers.

Hello Genius, a new series of board books, offers bold graphic illustrations and one manners word or phrase at a time. Titles include Mouse Says “Sorry,” Hippo Says “Excuse Me,” and Bear Says “Thank You.” In Penguin Says “Please,” Penguin starts out being bratty, demanding things without saying the magic word. By the end he learns how to ask politely and is rewarded with the things he requests. It’s a simple lesson that’s useful to learn as early as possible.

There are several contemporary examples of books whose attempts to teach manners are heavy-handed and unwelcome (Whoopi’s Big Book of Manners, for instance, or the new Terrible, Awful, Horrible Manners!). The books that succeed in their mission are the ones that help children learn some of the nuances of polite behavior and are still great stories — entertaining, engaging, and authentic-sounding. One of the best manners books in recent years, combining all the elements of successful etiquette-teaching, is Jane Yolen’s hugely popular How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? The volume combines Mark Teague’s very funny illustrations showing human parents and their dinosaur children with Yolen’s impeccable rhymes. Children get enough distance from the moral that they can be caught by surprise when they recognize their own naughty actions; as a little girl in my story time once exclaimed, “Hey! Sometimes I do that!” They get the message; and because it is delivered with sly wit that is funny to both the child and the adult reader, it is a treat for all. And for that, we should all say, “Thank you!”

Good Manners Books

Are You Going to Be Good? (Farrar, 2005) by Cari Best; illus. by G. Brian Karas
Bear Says “Thank You” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Hippo Says “Excuse Me” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mouse Says “Sorry” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Penguin Says “Please” (Picture Window, 2012) by Michael Dahl; illus. by Oriol Vidal
Mind Your Manners! (Farrar, 2005) by Diane Goode
What Do You Say, Dear?: A Book of Manners for All Occasions (Addison-Wesley, 1958) by Sesyle Joslin; illus. by Maurice Sendak
Manners Can Be Fun (Lippincott, 1936; Universe, 2004) by Munro Leaf
Emily’s Everyday Manners (Collins/HarperCollins, 2006) by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning; illus. by Steve Björkman
Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf (Knopf, 2007) by Judy Sierra; illus. by J. Otto Seibold
Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners (Knopf, 2012) by Judy Sierra; illus. by Tim Bowers
Thank You, Meiling (MarshMedia, 1999) by Linda Talley; illus. by Itoko Maeno
Manners Time (Free Spirit, 2009) by Elizabeth Verdick; illus. by Marieka Heinlen
The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? (Hyperion, 2012) by Mo Willems
Time to Say “Please”! (Hyperion, 2005) by Mo Willems
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? (Blue Sky/Scholastic, 2000) by Jane Yolen; illus. by Mark Teague

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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When I was ten years old, what most appealed to me as I followed the adventures of Mary, Colin, and Dickon were the cool ideas of the children running free with little adult supervision, their pact of secrecy, and the element of magic. But now, several decades later and in a new chapter of life, I entered The Secret Garden as a mother, making connections and gleaning insight into raising my now-three-year-old daughter Grace.

The character that led my way back into the garden is Mrs. Sowerby, the mother of Dickon and Martha, two of Mary’s companions. While most of the novel is set at sprawling Misselthwaite Manor where Mary and her cousin Colin live, Susan Sowerby lives with her twelve children in a modest cottage far across the moors. Though she enters the secret garden only once, her motherly maxims are sprinkled throughout the novel. From her own experience, “the two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way — or always to have it.” Martha, Mary’s maidservant and eventual friend, invokes her mother’s often-used saying in reference to Colin, who stays in bed convalescing from a largely imagined illness and barking orders all day. Everyone obeys him for fear of his infamous tantrums; as a result, he becomes a miserable, self-centered boy. Martha is also referring to Mary who, when living a privileged life in India, was “quite contrary” and had everything done for her. As a result she arrives at the manor frail, pale, and poorly equipped to perform even the simplest tasks, such as dressing herself.

Mrs. Sowerby’s wisdom is evergreen; she has been a champion of children and a mentor to parents for over one hundred years. Though her aphorism had little impact on me before becoming the mother of a preschooler — let alone when I was ten — the second part of it has been at the forefront of my mind in raising Grace; as the parenting guides suggest, I strive not to indulge her every whim. But the first part of Mrs. Sowerby’s statement about the dangers of never letting a child have his own way also rings true. Shortly after turning two, Grace started boldly asserting her independence, generally when we needed to leave the house on time. She was determined to do everything herself: fasten her clothes, pour the maple syrup, climb into her car seat, and other things that created stressful departures. Through necessity I started adding extra time to let her practice zipping, pouring, and clicking. But I soon realized that the benefit of letting her have her own way extended far beyond making my life easier. Her self-esteem improved, and her contrariness waned as she honed new skills and learned to express herself.

Another bit of parenting wisdom I culled from The Secret Garden was through a striking quote by the narrator explaining that two opposing elements cannot coexist: “Two things cannot be in one place. ‘Where, you tend a rose, my lad, / A thistle cannot grow.’” Burnett refers to both Colin and Mary in this commentary. Colin believes he’s too weak to walk, so he doesn’t even try to get out of bed. Mary is told she is contrary and selfish, and so she is. Both children discover on their own that these things are untrue, and in the realm of the secret garden they come alive. I can’t help but think how much sooner both Mary and Colin would have blossomed if someone had planted the seed in their minds that, instead of being thistles, they were destined to be healthy, wonderful roses.

I’m quite sure that when I was ten, the metaphor of roses and thistles meant little to me. But as a mother, the passage resonated quite loudly in helping Grace through her tumultuous threes. When a child starts exerting her independence and throwing tantrums, the “constant and specific praise” technique often touted in parenting books to encourage young toddlers in their strides toward walking and talking becomes more challenging to follow. But as hard as it can be, I’m trying to say only positive things about Grace’s actions, to cultivate her as a rose, as Burnett suggests, so that there is no room for a thistle.

The most important — and useful — lesson I’ve taken away from my recent rereading of The Secret Garden is that a lifelong friendship with books begins with storytelling. When Colin is convalescing, Mary tells him vivid tales of the garden in hopes of drawing him out of his bed: “Things are crowding up out of the earth,” she tells him, “and there are flowers uncurling and buds on everything and the green veil has covered nearly all the gray.” These stories stimulate his imagination until Colin is propelled to get out of bed and read about flowers and birds, a precursor to venturing outside.

Whenever I’ve thought about The Secret Garden over the years, I’ve recalled this image with much affection. I love to picture Colin and Mary curled up on the velvet couch having tea and biscuits, reading for hours on end. I couldn’t wait to read to my own child (and eventually have her read aloud to me). Grace didn’t start speaking until she was almost two years old, but my husband and I kept talking to her and telling her stories constantly. When we read to her, we used theatrics and dramatic pauses to get her to join in: “a comb and a brush and a bowl full of…” For the longest time, Grace would sit on our laps, touching the pages of board books, silent. I wondered if I would ever hear her voice.

One day, when Grace was almost two and a half years old, I was folding clothes near her bedroom. I heard the words “…tree, Shel Stein.” I walked into her room and saw her, with her back turned to me, a familiar green book propped up on the rocking chair. I listened in awe as she “read” The Giving Tree aloud. I heard her voice rise and fall in the same manner as ours; I heard the excited pause in her voice at every page turn. Grace had been reading all along; we just couldn’t hear what was going on in her mind until she found her voice.

As an English teacher, I was always glad that Burnett chose storytelling and reading as the forces that got Colin out of his bed and into the garden. In reading The Secret Garden as a mother, I realized that storytelling and reading had produced a similar magic in our house.

As a teacher, one strategy I used for getting students to reread a novel was to tell them to equate reading a book with visiting a museum. Then I’d invoke the teenage literary icon Holden Caulfield to help me make my point. In The Catcher in the Rye, I’d tell them, Holden never tires of going to the Museum of Natural History. Even though nothing in the museum ever changes, it’s a different place every time he enters because he is different. Perhaps he’d just seen a beautiful gasoline rainbow in the street or overheard his parents arguing that morning. With each layer of experience, the museum is a new place because he is a new person.

The Secret Garden was a new and wonderful place when I entered it as a mother, just as it was when I was ten years old. Colin and Mary have lived with me for as long as I can recall, and I’m thrilled that I could see so much of my current life reflected in their adventures. From this experience of revisiting a classic, I’m looking forward to seeing what parenting wisdom I can cull from Charlotte, Scout, Jo, and all my other childhood literary friends.

 From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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In the sunny frame of our kitchen door last summer stood our eight-year-old daughter, Twig. Her excitement was so great that there were no words — just wide misty eyes and a trembling chin, for cupped in her hands was a tiny bird.

The bright-eyed nestling was still covered with puffs of natal down, and it was snuggled in her hands much as it had snuggled in its nest. I turned away from the begging face and said:

“You can’t keep it, Twig. It is too young, and it is a rare bird. It is a rose-breasted grosbeak. Return it to the spot where you found it. Only the mother bird knows how to care for one so young.”

Tears rolled from an ocean of grief, but we had been through this before. Birds, mice and raccoons too young to raise had only brought sadder moments when they did not survive. I knew what was to be learned from raising such a bird, but I also knew the pitfalls. We returned the nestling. I went home. Twig waited under the bush.

However, I had not counted on the unpredictable nature of the rose-breasted grosbeak. Hours passed. The little face appeared in the doorway again. The bird was in her hand calling for food.

“The mother won’t feed it,” Twig said. This awakened in me a vague knowledge that grosbeaks sometimes desert their young when the nest has been disturbed. I went into the yard. Crying from the branches of several trees were other hungry little grosbeaks. So we ended up with two of them, and launched into a summer of watching and reading and looking that was worth all the trouble that is inherent in taking in foundling birds.

Twig learned quickly. Baby birds are hungry most of the time. We had to feed them every twenty minutes or so. We also had to feed them a special formula, and change it often so that it would be fresh. This started us off to the library and the local Audubon Society for information. We found a pamphlet published by the Society describing how to feed stranded nestlings of various species. Once we had the feeding solved, Twig became interested in birds in general. We spent several evenings going through our own books with her, technical but convertible when read with an adult. Some of them were Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, Leonard W. Wing‘s Natural History of Birds, and Harry Hann’s The Biology of Birds. The last we read while looking at the two birds, stretching their little wings, to see the feather tracks, feeling their lightness discovering why they could fly.

When she had had as much of this as she could absorb we went to the library for stories about birds. We found several she loved: Rufous Redtail by Helen Garrett, White Birds Island by Georgi Skrebitsky, White Patch, A City Sparrow by Olive L. Earle, and Run Sandpiper Run by Lloyd Goff. These we read aloud while the grosbeaks perched on Twig’s finger and slept. As the stories went along, she would touch the little birds from time to time and whisper: “I’ll bet you’ll do that some day.”

When the feathered pair were old enough to fly, we put them outdoors and fed them in the bushes near the kitchen door to which they returned when hungry. After feeding them, Twig would follow them from tree to tree to see where they sat to sleep. One day she asked why we had grosbeaks in Chappaqua, New York, but her grandmother had none in Pennsylvania.

This question had to be answered by altitude and trees, and specifically by the fact that grosbeaks love linden trees. I pointed out the linden tree in our yard, and on our next trip to the library Twig came home with American Trees by Russel T. Limbach and Knowing Your Trees by G. H. Collingwood. She learned the linden, and then she learned the maples, next the elm, and the scotch pine, and so around the yard. I helped her press leaves from all these trees between old newspapers and before we knew it, the grosbeaks had led to the trees, the trees to the flowers that grew under them, and the flowers to the insects that decorated them. While moving from tree to flower, she would often come  into the house to report a hole in the ground. We turned to The Mammal Guide by Ralph S. Palmer and Field Guide to Animal Tracks by Olaus J. Murie.Palmer’s book is excellent for adults working with children, for it not only identifies the animal but gives its life history, which is enchanting to children. Murie’s is wonderful because it makes detectives out of everyone, and the animals that can’t often be seen become real when their teeth marks are found on nuts or their footprints discovered in the dust.

For flowers we turned to the Book of Wild Flowers for Young People by F. Schuyler Mathews, and for insects, we started with a children’s book, Insects in Their World by Su Zan Noguchi Swain, and then went into a technical book An Introduction to Entomology by John Henry Comstock for brief but exciting excursions.

And so, that summer we learned the hills of New York through the arrival of a grosbeak in our home.

Admittedly a grosbeak is exotic. But the same chain of events can take place with the most common of the earth’s creatures. All children exposed to the earth and sky are collectors, and I am sure every home has had its share of worms, insects, polliwogs, and flowers, brought in by the curious young. We have found that the best thing to do when the air warms and the doors open is to invest in five good guide books — on birds, mammals, trees, flowers and insects — and keep them near a supply of empty jars on the kitchen sink, for in our house all life enters through the kitchen door.

These books are inexpensive and are regional. It is best to pick them up in your own neighborhood, for then you are sure that if you live in Maine you are not going to get birds and mammals and insects of California. (We picked up a nice series of these books in the gift shop at the New York Museum of Natural History.) After a few hours of helping the children name what they have found, they are usually off to the library to find out more about the foundling creatures. They are good systematists — all children are.

Our six-year-old-son, Craig, was worm-conscious one summer. He carried worms wherever he went. They brought him some inner satisfaction. After about a month of this, he became curious about the earth they lived in, and why they didn’t have any eyes. An excavation in the backyard marked his probe into the mysterious underworld. He found roots, ants and stones. At the end of this expedition into the earth he asked, “Where does the earth end?”

I got out The World We Live In by Lincoln Barnett and the editors of Life, an adult book that our children have claimed. Craig moved in new spheres. From land to sky, through space to the planets. And then he alighted on the dinosaurs! Fortunately there are several good dinosaur books for six-year-olds, an age when the giants of the earth are particularly appealing for some mysterious six-year-old reason. Two favorites are: So Long Ago by E. Boyd Smith and Dinosaurs by Marie Halun Bloch. Craig liked these because they use the scientific names. “Tyrannosaurus rex” is a name he tosses off with the same abandon as “Georgieporgiepuddin’n pie.”

We realized later that Craig would have discovered dinosaurs very soon via the cereal boxes, but we like to think that he came upon this fascinating world all on his own through worms. However, we are so grateful for any source of inspiration — be it cereal boxes or TV — that we are delighted no matter what provokes a question. Our only formula is that when the questions arise we have the books to answer them, or make some effort to get the inquirer to the library where we can search for the answer.

As a family we have a very strong sense of environment and to spend a summer vacation in a country where the animals, birds and plants are strangers makes us feel like outcasts. None of us knew much about the seashore when we started off for the ocean front along Delaware, so in addition to bathing suits we packed guide books on shells, seabirds and marine life, then took a bearing on the local library before finding a home on the beach.

A seashore makes a collector out of the most resistant. There is something about a shell gleaming in the sand that defies you to pass over it, and so our front porch became a marine zoological laboratory as all of us, children and adults, added to the collection. As soon as the tide went out, the children and I hurried down to the edge of the water to see what enchanting bit of life or debris the tide had brought ashore for us this time. The shells, of course, we learned first, gluing them on cardboard, looking them up in the guidebook and labeling them. Then came the crabs, two species of which we kept alive in an old tub. Twig and Craig would spend hours watching them eat or signal each other with their claws. They called them by their scientific names, Uca Pugnax and Minax. When we tired of crabs, there were the turtles and fish to learn, and many trips to the library to bring back every book that pertained to the sea. The Illustrated Book of the Sea by Leon A. Hausman and Felix Sutton was a fine juvenile version of our own technical book (Field Book of Seashore Life by Roy Waldo Miner). My husband, John, and I found that we learned pleasantly from this book, too. Then we discovered Wilfrid Bronson and his Children of the Sea. This story of a child and a porpoise took our own children beyond naming and labeling into the heart of the ocean. Pagoo by Holling Clancy Holling renewed the children’s interest in their crabs as the life history of a little hermit crab made a personality out of their pet in the tub on the porch. Oley, The Sea Monster by Marie Hall Ets brought man and the little seal from the wide ocean together in an amusing way for the children, and, as the evening closed over the ocean they would look out across the vast world of water and wonder if they could find an Oley.

We usually let the children set the pace in these adventures into nature, but since both John and I are deeply interested in natural history, we no doubt encourage any spark of curiosity they show. Any parents can do it, however, by simply being interested in what is around them and in what the children bring home. Fortunately the treasures from the wild fall into one of three groups, and it is easy to get the child started. It has to be either a plant, animal, or rock (mineral). With that decided, the book is the next step. A few minutes taken away from the ironing or dishwashing is all one needs, and, as for me, I need no encouragement. If it is an animal — a frog let us say — we next go after his markings, size and color. If it is an insect, we are usually satisfied to discover that it is a beetle — there are so many of these that I give up on any further identification unless it is big and common. Fortunately for parents, children have a habit of bringing in the big and the common. About June, I always brush up on walking sticks and praying mantises, ants and bees, as we are almost sure to have several of each every year.

Home and the backyard can be wonderfully stimulating to parent and child alike. Travel, of course, is a magnificent family adventure. However, we have discovered this: all too soon the sights grow mundane and the glitter and newness of an area tarnishes. Then there is nothing like a walk to collect the natural souvenirs of the land.

We went west several summers ago. At first, the cowboys were the thing. We all but tackled every cowboy during the first week we were in Wyoming. As it turned out, they were all good cowboys and nobody had shot anybody, and the west began to dull. Then one night the voices of the coyotes rose around our tent. Wide-eyed and goose-bumpy, the children sat up and listened. We talked about them until everyone was calm and sleepy. The next day however, we had to go out and see where the coyote lived. We walked through scratchy sage brush and over rocks, and all we found was a den, dry and uninteresting. Fortunately, the cousins we were visiting had a book Wild Animals of the Five Rivers Country by George Cory Franklin. The chapter on the coyote opened his dry den to us. We learned his habits and his food, and the following week we had to take another trip to see the pocket gophers. On this trip what we could not see was there anyway, as we knew all about the wild animals of this area. All About the Desert by Sam and Beryl Epstein brought more activity to the dry country.

Because it is hard to see much of the life that inhabits an area, we usually try to stop at roadside zoos as we travel. Although it is sad to see some of the bigger animals chained, this is an excellent way to see the animals and birds of a region. It also keeps the children content in the car for the next hundred miles or so, drawing the animals they saw or finding them in books. We also picnic along the way, and when the sandwiches are devoured and the adults are still eating, we send the children off into the woods to find as many new things as they can.

When they return with armloads of the countryside, we pack children and specimens in the car and put them to work making things out of them — dolls, hats, boats, necklaces — for there is a point beyond which all this scientific business becomes dull and must be replenished from play. Very often out of this kind of play comes the interest to collect, as it did in my own case, when I was a little older than my Craig. I was making boats of milkweed pods when it occurred to me that there were two different pods. I took them home to my father and he told me one was orange milkweed and the other was common milkweed. I went back for the plants and picked and pressed them. Later I pasted them on paper and wrote the names beside them. Other flowers joined the collection.

Then came the day when I walked into the meadow near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and everything was familiar. The bone-set, the ironweed, the butter-and-eggs were no longer masses of weeds. They were familiar faces. I shan’t forget the feeling of intimacy and comfort as I lay down among them to rest. No longer was the meadow full of “grass.” It was now filled with things that were mine. I had a sense of belonging that I had never known before. To this day the familiar eastern meadow brings a sense of quiet to me, and all the quaint and loved names rush hack to mind.

Experiences like this drove John and me to writing about the natural world. Both of us had a desire to pass on to our children and other children the smell of a summer meadow, the sounds of a winter night; for to us one of the great emotional experiences of life is to be so familiar with a spot of earth that it “belongs” to you. There is a feeling of security in looking at a familiar yard, or a street with elms along it. It gives one a sense of identity that all life craves whether it be raccoon or bird, turtle or child.

The human being is so mobile in the twentieth century that this experience is often missed; but it can happen to every child, whether he lives on the streets of a city or on a wandering trailer. A bird that comes to a feeding station, a tree that grows by an apartment door can become the poetry of a lifetime. Childhood is brief, but its impressions are indelible, and it is little enough to tell a child that the tree by the door is a sycamore, that robins nest in it pigeons sit on it starlings sleep in it, and that its roots go into the earth.

And then to give him a library card.

Article originally appeared in the June 1959 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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But funny isn’t something we’re taught to respect. That could be why, when writers embark on the serious business of crossing cultural boundaries in their work, they don’t often start out with humor. In 2004, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith spoke at the Reading the World conference about the dearth of funny books with cultural resonance. Why, they asked, are multicultural books so very serious?

It was a valid question then. What’s surprising is the degree to which it remains valid today, especially in books for middle-grade readers. Books set in foreign countries are still largely about oppression, while those in hyphenated-American communities are about the challenges of finding oneself and becoming American. While many have humorous moments, they are not, by and large, funny books.

It seems especially necessary that children’s books, in the balance, convey more than a one-dimensional image of “the other,” yet the identity tale of oppressed people continues to dominate those books dubbed “multicultural.” Perhaps the problem is that the very notion of a culturally grounded story is perceived as worthy and important, not concepts we associate with laughter. But the truth is that you can’t see people as fully human if all you can feel for them is pity. Funny books with cultural contexts are capable of subverting and questioning issues of identity and belonging. By upsetting worthy apple carts, they offer new and necessary views of characters with cultural connections beyond the mainstream.

The pioneer in mixing humor with matters of race, culture, and, yes, oppression is undoubtedly Christopher Paul Curtis. The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 was published in 1995. The scene in which Byron’s lips get stuck to the family car’s side-view mirror is the one most readers call to mind, but there are others, many of them much more pointed than that one, as when the boys are faced with the prospect of going to the bathroom in the woods. Byron says, sardonically, “Snakes? I ain’t scared of no damn snake, it’s the people I’m worried about.” He means white people, of course, on the family’s journey south. The humor slams the reader with the grimness of the circumstances, even while it gives the characters a means of coping.

Humor in The Watsons is a mechanism Curtis uses to lead readers to an understanding of the insidiousness of racism and discrimination. It allows us to align clearly with one group of people and against another, in a deliberate stance that counters the prejudices of the period. If you’re with Kenny and his family, you can’t condone the racism they have to endure. Inequity, discrimination, and injustice give thematic impetus to the characters’ journeys. Because we can laugh, we can bear to navigate those obstacles along with them.

Since 1995, other writers of multicultural books have ventured into humorous terrain. In Julia Alvarez’s How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay, the unorthodox use of a strikeout in the title places a tongue-in-cheek tonal stamp on the work before the reader has turned a single page. It’s plain that this relative is about to change young Miguel’s life forever. He can’t hold out against this woman who is practically a force of nature, and neither can the reader. Her character, larger than life and twice as real, creates a playfulness that runs through the book and its sequels.

One way to cross cultural borders is by normalizing customs and preferences that might typically be seen as un-American. Lenore Look does this in her chapter books with Chinese American protagonists. In Ruby Lu, Brave and True, for example, foods like “jook” are casually named in passing. Don’t know what that is? Well, all right, there’s a glossary, but does it really matter? After all, when I read Enid Blyton in my youth I had no idea what scones were. It didn’t stop me for a minute.

Ruby’s Chinese school is cleverly normalized by the elegant teacher, by the funny coincidence of a namesake friend, and by Mom’s memories of English school in China. A bilingual dog responds to commands in Cantonese and English—a subtle suggestion that in this world, both languages are equally privileged. Normalizing the unfamiliar allows the reader to laugh with, rather than at, the character in such a story. It also implies that you don’t need to understand everything about a person in order to share a smile. By placing cultural markers in this way, the writer draws borders between cultures, and then makes them permeable, thereby giving the reader permission to laugh.

Look’s Alvin Ho books feature an endearing boy character with a family and community whose imperatives are often at odds with his own fears. The first two books, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things and Alvin Ho: Allergic to Camping, Hiking, and Other Natural Disasters, and the fourth, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and Other Fatal Circumstances, are laugh-out-loud funny. They adroitly traverse the emotional spaces of Alvin’s Concord, Massachusetts, neighborhood and his Chinese American family. A less felicitous choice in the third title, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Birthday Parties, Science Projects, and Other Man-Made Catastrophes, is a plot line related to “playing settlers and Indians” at a friend’s birthday party. Perhaps unintentionally, it nonetheless objectifies American Indians, and normalizes a controversial playground remnant from the colonial past. To me, it seemed a perplexing and discomfiting element. Sometimes those cultural border-crossing zones contain landmines. Sometimes a joke can backfire. Maybe it’s just that as a writer from an underrepresented group myself, I feel a need to be particularly mindful when I’m engaged in the representation of others.

In Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization, the narrative voice leads readers into a richly funny rendition of 1940s America. The book stars Neddie, son of the Wentworthstein shoelace king, along with a sizable cast of eccentric characters. Nor is race ignored as a social factor of the time—a racist comment made at the Brown-Sparrow Military Academy hits home because of its offhandedness. Neddie doesn’t get it, but the reader will.

The Neddiad and its sequels, The Yggyssy and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, are madcap escapades with space aliens, baffling allies, and true-blue villains. Houses appear and vanish at whim, the Catskills are peopled with giants, reality itself sometimes seems a mirage, and the jokes range from subtle to slapstick and everything in between. Time itself may be the cultural border crossed in these books. They take the reader into a past with many racial, cultural, and even religious strands, from all of which Pinkwater weaves a genuinely American humorous fantasy.

A comparable book with clear cultural context is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where comic book and cartoon conventions meet the movies of Satyajit Ray. The book is a phantasmagorical journey driven by the ill will of a villain who represents the silencing of all stories.

The sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life, draws its inspiration from sources as diverse as Beowulf and Super Mario. While equally filled with dramatic moments, it lacks the ingenuity, the freshness, and the heart of Haroun. Both books, however, are packed with layers of humor accessible to all, along with bilingual jokes that are special treats for cultural insiders.

It’s hard to juggle insiders’ jokes while crossing cultural borders, but they can be used simultaneously as a nod to readers in the know and an invitation to others. In Janet Wong’s verse novel Minn and Jake, Jake’s racial background is never mentioned. In the sequel, Minn and Jake’s Almost Terrible Summer, we learn that he has a Korean grandmother. That makes him one-quarter Korean, or as he says, “Quarpa.” By punning on the insider’s term hapa, the author invites not only Minn to share in the joke but the reader as well.

Humorous outsider narratives are even rarer than funny books written from within the cultures concerned. It’s easy to see why. When you’re treading on unfamiliar ground, humor can seem to add an unnecessary banana peel. The outsider risks being tripped up by nuance and implication, regional specificity and the dangers of caricature. Candace Fleming takes all these risks and more in Lowji Discovers America, her story of a boy from India whose family is Parsi, belonging to the Zoroastrian faith. Lowji’s spunky character and his occasional precocity go far in establishing his appeal. A best friend left behind in India is counterpoint to new friends in America without for a minute implying a hierarchical comparison between the two. Of course, humor can also sometimes have a long fuse, tapping the deep and personal sources that Eudora Welty said give rise to all story. As a result, it’s possible that to a Parsi reader, some element or other might ring false. Sometimes writing funny books can call for bravery in a writer.

An improbable combination (best friends in suburban Maryland and an eccentric Bollywood movie star) served as my entry into the subversive world of humor. My middle-grade novel The Grand Plan to Fix Everything employs cultural fusion to define the relationship between best friends of whom one is Indian-American and the other is not. Eleven-year-old Dini is devastated because her family’s impending move to India means that she and her best friend Maddie will have to miss Bollywood dance camp—in Maryland.

There is no question in my mind that whatever loopiness I’ve succeeded in bringing to the page I owe to those Wodehouse novels I read years ago. They were not written for children, but I read them with my eleven-year-old hunger to understand the world. Humor can help a reader do just that. It must be handled with care, so the reader is laughing with the characters and situations, as in the work of Christopher Paul Curtis, and not at them.

In generous hands, humor can appear to fix the things that need fixing in the world. And then it can turn around and wink at you, the reader, as if you’re complicit in the manufacture of the fiction. Children in the middle grades are eccentric, idiosyncratic, and poised on the brink of reinventing both themselves and their world. The middle-grade reader is a perfect audience for the writer seeking to bridge gaps, make connections, or cross borders of culture, race, place, and language—with laughter leading the way.

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In the same way that talking about fantasy books without mentioning a certain boy wizard would be absurd (see Roger Sutton’s “What Hath Harry Wrought?”), any discussion of YA dystopia must acknowledge the impact of the taut, intricately plotted, and haunting Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. While YA dystopias existed before it (and many of these were spawned by Lois Lowry’s The Giver, for younger readers), there is no discounting the bump in numbers and popularity since The Hunger Games was published, and the movie has only served to draw more attention. Thus, it’s helpful to know what makes for a good YA dystopian novel, and to have some titles in mind when you get the inevitable groan from teens after they finish Mockingjay and want more to read.

A note on definition: while shambling, brain-eating zombies; nuclear holocausts; electromagnetic space pulses that knock out most of the population; or alien invasions all make for compelling reading, they do not necessarily fall into the category of dystopia. Now, if the survivors of those various tragedies form a messed-up society where freedoms are curtailed in order to protect its citizens from imagined future terrible events, then we’re talking dystopia.

There are four major elements that appear consistently in good YA dystopian novels. Certainly a book need not have all of them, but the best do: a setting so vividly and clearly described that it becomes almost a character in itself; individuals or forces in charge who have a legitimate reason for being as they are; protagonists who are shaped by their environment and situations; and a conclusion that reflects the almost always dire circumstances.

In Across the Universe by Beth Revis, the setting is an interstellar spaceship, Godspeed, which is at once wondrous and claustrophobic to Amy, who was awoken from a cryogenic chamber and must now navigate the physical and social anomalies of this self-contained world. The descriptions are riveting, and the layers of lies that are built around the ship (and keep the generations who live and die within its walls docile) make the ship itself as integral an element as protagonist Amy.

In Fever Crumb, Philip Reeve uses gripping, slightly mysterious, complex language to describe his setting. The city of London and its scrambling, scrappy residents, the strange and slowly disintegrating giant head in which the Engineers live, and the very earliest rumblings (this novel is set centuries before Reeve’s Mortal Engines quartet) of the mechanics that will allow for the moving cities are stunning. The humor built into the descriptions is an elegant contrast to Fever’s hyper-rational approach to life, and the setting acts as an impressive foil against which she must struggle to remain the same rather than be shaped by the larger, much more wild and unpredictable but simultaneously much richer world.

A clever setting-as-character example is the world of Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. The prison experiment called Incarceron, a now self-aware and tyrannical entity, shapes the dystopia as much as the people who exist there. Fisher’s protagonists are intriguing and well developed, but even they are less memorable than the brilliantly conceived Incarceron that—having escaped the control of its original creators—sees, influences, punishes, and restricts according to its own standards.

A bad guy with no depth, vulnerability, history, or context functions as a foil for the protagonist but adds little else to the story. Depth of character makes the struggle between good and evil (against an individual or society) far more vivid. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Snow is one of many worthy villains; interestingly, he is perhaps the more blatantly malign but also slightly more sympathetic villain (in comparison to Coin) to emerge from the series. It is clear that he is following in a line of leaders who made similar choices, and it is equally clear that he is an exaggerated representation of the society in which he came to power. The lack of a specific “bad guy” but rather an example of a well-intentioned society gone horribly awry is presented in Ally Condie’s Matched, where the earnest and well-meaning Society has evolved into an entity that has whittled down the world into manageable, easily digestible amounts: this society allows exactly one hundred songs (and pictures, poems, etc.) and arranges carefully planned love matches that take any guesswork out of romance. It is all safe and cozy and may not immediately appear dystopian—until the reality of not being able to shape anything in your own life truly sinks in.

In Ashes, Ashes by Jo Treggiari, Lucy is prepared to acknowledge that ninety-nine percent of the population is gone and that her choices are few. What she isn’t ready to accept, and what makes this novel so complex, is that she is apparently the only immune person left on Earth, and she could best help the planet’s survival by giving her blood—all her blood—for medical use. The pace is superb, and the vivid descriptions of the new attempts at society are well crafted, but it is the choices the amoral but brilliant scientists make that push Lucy to define herself as martyr or survivor. The fact that the key scientist still feels like the kindest person Lucy has recently encountered complicates things all the more, as it lays bare how intensely vulnerable and alone she is in this ravaged world.

It is convenient to the story to have a rebel grandparent or elder who remembers how it used to be “before” and can account for how his or her offspring is different than the average citizen, but for the most part good dystopian novels don’t just take contemporary characters from realistic fiction and dump them into dystopic settings. The characters who clearly cannot see beyond the ways in which they have been raised force readers to consider not only how they might respond in that society, but also to thoughtfully assess elements of adolescence that carry across setting (snark, pushing at boundaries, curiosity about and interest in the newest technology, hormonal adjustments). Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, set in a dystopian environment where resources are plentiful but the use of them is highly suspect, offers characters shaped by having been raised in this world of enforced conformity. While some resist and others embrace it, Westerfeld’s protagonists are carefully operating within the boundaries of his creepy, image-obsessed world.

Two prime examples from opposite ends of the dystopian civilization spectrum are M. T. Anderson’s Feed and the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness. Both address the effects of being permanently tapped into constantly flowing information (in Ness’s world, it is more metaphorical as a virus that causes thoughts to be heard; in Anderson’s capitalist nightmare everything is literally messaged directly into your brain), and both feature protagonists who reflect their environments, even as they catch occasional glimpses of how life could be otherwise. The protagonists are so richly developed, so compelling, and so hopelessly ensnared that they evoke sympathy even as they inevitably exasperate the reader.

Finally, Divergent by Veronica Roth is a movie-ready example of a novel that includes tantalizing snippets of a dystopic society that has led to citizens deriving their identity from belonging to one of five personality-based factions. While much of the focus is actually on Beatrice’s response to not slotting perfectly into one of those factions and her training once she chooses, there is no doubt that she will indeed select from the limited options she is presented, unable to envision what a different path would resemble.

In terms of how a novel wraps up, hopeful is good, and measured optimism works beautifully, but often you just can’t escape unscathed. In some cases, authors are daring enough (or heartless enough, depending on your tolerance for sad endings) to let their protagonists face seemingly insurmountable obstacles and find that they are, indeed, just that. The shocking conclusion of Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick is one of the coolest new examples of this: while the novel is closer to post-apocalyptic than pure dystopia, there is certainly a dystopic community in which Alex finds herself—a settlement that doesn’t try to exist as the world had been before but is shaped by an entirely new set of morals and standards. This paradigm shift, should the members survive their own chilling ethical choices, will surely result in a quintessential dystopic world.

The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch is also set as an end-of-the-world survival novel, but the strictly controlled elements of the community that has rebuilt itself to resemble how life used to be (complete with creepy baseball games that feel so…eerily incorrect in their very normalcy) seem like an obvious example of dystopia masking as utopia. Life there is better than what exists outside of Settler’s Landing, but the protagonist is forced to conclude that there is no such thing as a true haven anymore.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother probably represents the purest example on the list—modern technology meets classic dystopic elements—even while the book itself is part instructional guide, part love story, and part rant at the increasingly dictatorial powers that be that consider safety at any cost a reasonable exchange. Small personal victories for the protagonist and his friends are present, but the power of Big Brother is hardly tempered by their work, and the folks who tangled with the government are all permanently scarred by the encounter.

A bonus element from the above titles is the lingering point of consideration with which readers are left—wondering how and where they would fit (disturbing the universe, representing one of the masses, or somewhere in between), and perhaps also contemplating how near or far their own social structure is from what they just read. All the titles above lend themselves to such musings, and the protagonists within are also likely to give some thought to these issues—it is often how they move from quiet discontent to activism. Of course, these questions are moot when you aren’t sure if you are going to survive at all, and there are several dystopian novels that feature characters who (though the reader knows better) would scoff at the notion of philosophical debate, given that they are literally running, fighting, or competing to stay alive. Well-written dystopias, the most memorable ones, offer both: space for asking big-scale life questions along with plenty of adventure and danger to keep things exciting as one cogitates.

Good YA Dystopias

• Feed (Candlewick, 2002) by M. T. Anderson
• Ashes (Egmont, 2011) by Ilsa J. Bick
• Hunger Games trilogy: The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008), Catching Fire (2009), Mockingjay (2010) by Suzanne Collins
• Matched (Dutton, 2010) by Ally Condie (sequel Crossed, 2011)
• Little Brother (Tor, 2008) by Cory Doctorow
• Incarceron (Dial, 2010) by Catherine Fisher (sequel Sapphique, 2010)
• The Eleventh Plague (Scholastic, 2011) by Jeff Hirsch
• Chaos Walking trilogy: The Knife of Never Letting Go (Candlewick, 2008), The Ask and the Answer (2009), Monsters of Men (2010) by Patrick Ness
• Fever Crumb (Scholastic, 2010) by Philip Reeve (sequel A Web of Air, 2011)
• Across the Universe (Razorbill/Penguin, 2011) by Beth Revis (sequel A Million Suns, 2012)
• Divergent (Tegen/HarperCollins, 2011) by Veronica Roth (sequel Insurgent, May 2012)
• Ashes, Ashes (Scholastic, 2011) by Jo Treggiari
• The Uglies series: Uglies (Simon Pulse, 2005), Pretties (2005), Specials (2006), Extras (2007) by Scott Westerfeld

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I have never liked the lists of “boy books” and “girl books” that appear in libraries, parenting magazines, educational handouts, and even make up whole books themselves. There always seems to be a note included that the choices can be enjoyed by both genders, and yet there continue to be separate lists. As a feminist, it drives me crazy that we are still talking this way, but it is more than that. The separation doesn’t make sense to me because it does not match my experiences reading books with boys and girls.

I have been reading aloud to kids and discussing their reading in book groups, as well as reading with my sons, for the past fifteen years. I have yet to have a child tell me they disliked a book we have read because they thought it was either “for girls” or “for boys.” The secret is that it simply has to be a good book.

It is sad to think that girls who read the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and the books of Louisa May Alcott would miss out on reading Treasure Island or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Or vice versa.

When my boys were very young, I never gave the gender of characters a second thought. I just read as many wonderful stories as possible to them. I noticed that picture books had far more male characters than female. It doesn’t get more fun than Dr. Seuss, but there are few admirable heroines in his stories. I did not, however, notice my two sons caring whether the lead character was a male or female person, or for that matter, as was often the case, a male or female animal. Do we hold the animals in E. B. White’s books or those of Robert Lawson to rigid gender stereotypes? Do children think about the fact that Charlotte is a girl who is the truest friend to Wilbur, a boy? I don’t think that is their focus.

As my sons grew and we read more chapter books, the gender of the characters continued to make no difference. They loved the silly Pippi Longstocking and the fierce Ramona as much as they did little Sam Krupnik in Lois Lowry’s series. As a result, they had the opportunity to laugh at and admire kids not all that different from themselves. I remember the special joy they experienced when, as second graders, they could be hysterical about the antics of a preschooler. It was such fun to see them looking back at their past. And it made no difference if it was a boy or a girl; it just had to be funny. I don’t think kids care if the main characters in the Roald Dahl books are male or female; they eagerly jump from Charlie and James to Matilda and Sophie. The kids I know insist on reading them all.

In many of the early children’s classics we read, such as those of E. Nesbit, it is a group of children, both male and female, who have the major roles and adventures. C. S. Lewis sends two girls and two boys into the wardrobe to Narnia. Does anyone ask this gender question about Harry, Ron, and Hermione?

There are so many books I want to share with my sons that no matter how much reading we do (and we do a lot), I have lists in my head that we will never be able to complete together. That is what got me started on our read-aloud summer of “‘Girl’ Books I Didn’t Want My Boys to Miss.” We started with The Secret Garden, which really shouldn’t be considered a girls’ book because two of the three main characters are boys. It is a book, however, about feelings. Not only did my sons love it, but my husband didn’t want me to begin the reading until he was home. So I decided to see how far I could push this idea of mine. If you are setting up a girls’ book category, nothing fits better than A Little Princess. Well, all I can say is that my three male listeners were as enamored of it as they were of the others by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The fact is they were responding to the beautiful writing and not to the gender of the characters (in an all-girls school). Could I go still further? Yes, even my much-loved Fossil sisters in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (and then Theater Shoes) were a hit in my house—though it was not the ballet but the portrayal of theater in England to which my family was drawn.

As we began reading aloud Little House in the Big Woods, I found myself stunned that this was considered a girls’ book. Laura and Mary may be the heroines, but if you want to stick to stereotypes, has anyone noticed how much of this book is about the technical construction of homes and barns and icehouses or how many pages are devoted to guns and hunting and defending oneself? (What we noticed most about the book in the series about Almanzo’s childhood, Farmer Boy, was all the food!)

We also read Heidi and began seriously planning a family vacation in the Swiss Alps, which exceeded all our dreams when we were able to make it happen more than three years later. (My son ran through the fields of flowers, announcing he had made it to “Heidiland!”) In any case, this summer reading series continued a good deal past the summer and answered both my questions and my prayers.

Some might argue that the men in my family are in the minority and that the children in book groups are not a random sample, and that all may be true. But I have spent a lot of time considering the powerful negative impacts of generalizations. There is no need to reinforce the ideas of differences between the sexes. Those ideas are still widespread and deeply engrained in our culture. There are, however, serious reasons to protect those in the minority and serious dangers in encouraging people, particularly children, to believe that they belong to a somehow “deviant” group.

Our children—both boys and girls—lose when we constrain their reading preferences. Ironically, what is acceptable in books for girls today is a much wider range of characters and themes, thanks to the advances of feminism, while what is acceptable for boys is still sadly influenced by what I assume is homophobia and an intolerance of effeminacy. A girl reading Homer Price, Sherlock Holmes, or anything by Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain would be viewed as a reader of classics, but a boy reading much of Louisa May Alcott, the Brontës, or Jane Austen would have a harder time with his image. Girls, at the same time, are harmed by believing boys cannot be interested in female heroines and authors.

Of course, some boys may want to read books about boys and some girls, books about girls. I would hope, though, that we could let those choices be truly free. Let’s stop dividing into blue and pink pages. Let’s protect every person’s right to read what they love.

The post On the Rights of Reading and Girls and Boys appeared first on The Horn Book.

With the increasing momentum of the local food movement, a bevy of conscientious young parents are likely seeking media to further educate/indoctrinate their children. What better way to instruct your urban children in the true origins of their local, organic chicken dinner than with artist Julia Rothman’s Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life (Storey, October)? Although published for adults, Farm Anatomy is little more than a hefty, hipster-friendly visual dictionary with a dash of farmer’s almanac, making it a good choice for the whole family to share. Rothman’s pen and ink illustrations are heavily hand-labeled, detailing every part of farm life from soil composition to the twenty-six distinct styles of rooster combs.

Rothman’s images can be a bit pastoral and rosy, but the book’s content doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of a working farm. One glance at the double-page spread full of archaic, frightening-looking “tools of the trade” makes me grateful that my urban existence does not require something called an “ear-notcher”.

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