Julie Roach

Cambridge Public Library youth services manager (and Horn Book reviewer) Julie Roach will be discussing library services for preschool children at our Fostering Lifelong Learners event (free; you should come) at CPL on April 25th. I asked her to share some of her thoughts on serving this (very) particular audience. (I think her answer to question #5 is one of the wisest things I’ve heard.)

1. What’s the most important thing about library service to preschoolers that you DIDN’T learn in library school and wish you had?

In library school you learn the theory and philosophy behind library service to preschoolers, which is as it should be.  Children’s librarians need a solid background there before venturing out on their own.  But I’m not sure any academic setting could have prepared me for what an emotional roller coaster a typical work day would be.  Every day with preschoolers and their entourage rockets back and forth between hilarity and tragedy, discovery and near-disaster (or sometimes full-on disaster) and the situation gets more complex depending on how many other people are in the space and their range of ages and stages.  In the mornings, our children’s room often has more than 200 people in it.  The drama is both utterly addictive and completely exhausting.

2. If you were suddenly told you had to do a story time in FIVE MINUTES, what would be your go-to stories?

This actually happens to me quite regularly!  Our storytimes skew pretty young, so I gravitate toward funny stories with very simple plots or concepts that invite kids to participate. They tend to involve animals or vehicles that make a lot of noise.  I also want to make sure the parents and caregivers get to laugh—I want them to see how fun this all is so, hopefully, they’ll go home and keep reading aloud.  I love Jan Thomas’s books, Bark George by Jules Feiffer, Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow? by Susan Shea, The Bus for Us by Suzanne Bloom, Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard, Tiny Little Fly by Michael Rosen, A Perfect Square by Michael Hall, and Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s concept books.  And if the group is such that everyone can see a smaller book, I have fun using Olivier Dunrea’s gosling books.

3. What is the darndest thing a preschooler ever said to you?

This is one of the job’s best perks–a conversation with a preschooler can take you to a whole new dimension!  Although often they’re just saying out loud what everyone else is secretly thinking.  Once a very small but confident child approached the desk and dramatically looked around our rather large children’s room.  Then he looked right at me and demanded:  “Which one is the best book?”

4. If you could give publishers of preschool books one piece of advice what would it be?

Keep making those really great books, please!  The ones that make us laugh, the ones that make us think, the ones that make us gasp, the ones that make us a little scared, the ones that put us in charge.  We especially like them simple!

5. And if you could give parents of preschoolers one piece of advice, what would it be?

All of the books in the library are free to borrow and you get to return them later, so let your young child pick out a book too, on his own—even if his choice is impractical or too hard or too easy, even if you have a copy at home, even if it’s the unabridged edition of David Copperfield!  How empowering and special to get to choose your own book when you’re small.  How deflating to hear that your choice is not suitable for you.  Save some room in the library bag for the child to have a choice.

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

The post Five Questions for Julie Roach appeared first on The Horn Book.

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.

The post No Joke! Humor and Culture in Middle-Grade Books appeared first on The Horn Book.

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

The post What Makes a Good YA Dystopian Novel? appeared first on The Horn Book.

The sight of a ‘children’s room’ in a public library just after school hours is enchanting…they pour into its doors, the crowd of children, well-dressed, poorly clad, boys, girls, big, small, all with an assured air of welcome, comfortably, easily, happily at home among bookshelves as they are in no other spot. Thirty years ago nobody would have dreamed of such a golden picture as a possibility.

So wrote the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Children’s Library Yearbook Number One, a 1929 volume reviewing what might have been called, in the idiom of the time, three decades of progress.

But specialized work with children in the burgeoning public libraries was well underway before 1899. It didn’t spread from the storied cities of the Northeast, with their intellectual eminence; it arose almost simultaneously in many scattered locales. None were more representative of the children’s library movement, however, than Cleveland and Pittsburgh—cities of the industrial heartland with large immigrant populations and, crucially, a succession of gifted, forceful librarians who met a prevailing need in a historic partnership.

William Howard Brett was an accidental librarian. Born in 1846, he repeatedly tried to enlist in the Union Army—once putting a slip of paper in his shoe inscribed with the number 18, so he could honestly say he was “over eighteen”—until, in the last year of the war, he passed muster as a drummer boy. After the war his attempt to go to college foundered for lack of funds. But he was an avid, discerning reader and made his mark selling books—first in his native Warren, Ohio, then at the big Cleveland bookstore Cobb & Andrews. When the post of city librarian became vacant in 1884, who better qualified?

The Cleveland Public Library—originally the Public School Library—was then housed on the second and third floors of Board of Education headquarters. In the circulation department, borrowers waited at a high counter for an attendant to fetch the requested books. No one under fourteen could get a card.

As a bookseller, Brett knew two big things that the cloistered librarian didn’t: the value of browsing among books and the importance of books to children. He brightened up the quarters, and made them comfortable; he cataloged the collection by the new Dewey system. And with added space, a few years later, he arranged the nonfiction in alcoves by subject and allowed readers to go to the bookcases. In a large city library, where the borrowers were strangers to the staff, open shelves were a daring innovation.

Brett had audacity. A year after taking office, he submitted an article to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, called “Books for Youth,” soliciting a donation of $5,000 (about $125,000 today) to build up a collection of reputable children’s books. Youngsters shouldn’t be reading “worthless and corrupt literature,” he wrote, because the library didn’t have enough copies of Louisa May Alcott titles to meet the demand. No concerned citizen responded, but the article was reprinted in Library Journal, with an editorial salvo, and launched Brett as a children’s library advocate. In later years, Anne Carroll Moore was reputed to have called Brett “the first great children’s librarian.” The quote may be apocryphal, but the tribute rang true, and stuck.

Brett’s polemic against trash also expressed a common sentiment. In those days, you didn’t have to be stodgy to look askance at Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore or Horatio Alger’s heroes. What enlightened grownup didn’t?

The Cleveland Library was then, like many others, serving children through the schools. But the popularity of the school collections only demonstrated to Brett “the pressing need of a system of branch libraries and delivery stations in a city so widely extended as our own.” In 1892, the library opened the first of four branches in existing buildings; from 1904 to 1914, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie, seven new libraries were constructed, with spacious, attractive children’s rooms, in key neighborhoods around the city: the neighborhood library came to be, in large part, as a place that kids could get to on their own.

At the Central Library, meanwhile, restrictions on children’s use were soon relaxed and, in 1896, the age limit was abolished altogether; to join the library, a child had only to write his or her name, and get a parent’s signature. But where were the newcomers to go? Brett’s solution was to partition off the largest of the alcoves, and cut a door into the corridor. In this makeshift space—with high bookcases around the walls, and upper shelves reached by a ladder that children propelled (to their delight) by pushing with a foot—Effie Louise Power was installed as librarian. In later years, Power liked to speak of herself as “Mr. Brett’s first children’s librarian.” He had recruited her himself, out of high school—making her, according to youth services historian Christine Jenkins, the first person “hired specifically for children’s work.”

Brett made another significant hire in Linda Eastman, who became vice-librarian in 1896 and shared his interest in children. The next year, Eastman and Power launched the Children’s Library League to encourage respect for books and teach their proper care. There was also a reading component—children made lists of the books they read, for posting as suggestions for others. The first year’s program climaxed spectacularly with a mass meeting in the city’s largest auditorium.

At the American Library Association conference that year, when Brett was president, Eastman presented a paper on the program—one of many contributions to ALA affairs that Cleveland librarians made regularly through the formative years of children’s services. They did groundbreaking work, they wrote about it for professional journals, they shared their experience with colleagues. A new profession was rapidly taking shape.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, by contrast with its counterpart in Cleveland, sprang “almost full-grown from the mind and purse” of its namesake, as a later director wrote. The central building opened in 1895, and within five years there were five large neighborhood branches, with three more soon to follow. In 1898, Frances Jenkins Olcott was hired to oversee service to children in the growing system, the first in the country to hold such a post.

In Cleveland, Effie Power had been tapped to be a children’s librarian, and later got professional training. Frances Olcott had professional training (at the New York State Library School, the nation’s first) and might be called a children’s librarian incarnate. She had spent her early years in France, where her father was in the consular service; she’d been homeschooled by parents steeped in the traditional literature of Germany and France. She had a sense of drama.

She was also a force—on fertile, uncharted ground. The Progressivism of the period imbued librarians with a social mission to elevate the masses. In cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, that meant both the majority of children who were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and the school-leavers—the overwhelming number who didn’t get past the eighth grade, if they got that far.

No child left out, might have been the motto. With a strong, supportive director, Olcott instituted one after another “experiment”—her word—in extending the library’s reach. There was storytelling in all the branches: cycles of myths and legends for the older children, fairy tales for the younger ones. By 1905–06, more than 600 stories were told to over 400 groups of children. There was Library Day once a week at the summer playgrounds, a cozy introduction to books away from the branches. “The ‘little mothers’ invariably saved a place on their cards for a book to please the baby brother or sister tugging at their skirts,” a librarian reported, “or for some older member at home.”

There were also programs, such as the “Home Library,” tailored to the time and place. A neat bookcase with “a small, carefully selected collection of attractively bound and illustrated books” was kept in a neighborhood home. The oldest child in that family usually served as librarian, recording the books borrowed and returned at the group’s weekly meeting. There, a “friendly visitor” led the group of ten to twelve youngsters in an informal program of games, storytelling, and group discussion. Before long the groups ranged across the city and covered the ethnic map.

All of this was labor-intensive work, and much of it was performed by students at the Training School for Children’s Librarians, housed in the Central Library. Founded in 1899 as a training class to meet pressing local needs, it emerged in 1901 as a professional, certificate-granting school, with (eventually) both one- and two-year programs and more than half its students from outside the Pittsburgh area. A few had four-year college degrees; a few already had library experience. The next year the school enrolled graduates of Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr; it had “special students”—working librarians—from the New York Public Library and from Cleveland, Des Moines, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Mansfield, Ohio; already, its graduates were working as far afield as Galveston, Texas.

Frances Olcott was the head of this booming operation, as she was of children’s services, and the instructors were drawn from the library staff. The course of study, that first year, ranged from the basics of ordering and cataloging, to children’s literature and storytelling, to school-library relations and Home Libraries, to “psychology” and “civic education.” (“Psychology” meant reading the childhood portraits of Dickens and Spyri and Ewing, not “analysis of the children themselves.”) Then there was the practice work: “presenting various [facets] of the cosmopolitan life of a fast-growing industrial city.” And, increasingly, there were visiting lecturers: in 1914–15, the roster included Caroline Hewins, Alice Jordan, Anne Carroll Moore, and Boy Scout Librarian Franklin Mathiews. No one prominent in the field escaped.

Olcott’s reign over library and school ended abruptly in 1911, when an “insurrection” by library school students—in the words of the library director—led to her dismissal. Yes, she could be a prima donna. She didn’t lose her standing in the profession, however, and it was she who was asked to write the section on “Library Work with Children” for ALA’s 1914 Manual of Library Economy.

In 1916, the Training School became the Carnegie Library School, and soon courses of study for school librarians and general librarians were added. But it remained preeminent, under the new name, as a wellspring of work with children. In school and library conjoined, Pittsburgh had talent in depth.

One of the special students in the Training School had been Cleveland’s Effie Power—about to move from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to St. Louis and back to Pittsburgh, where she eventually became one of Olcott’s successors. For her successor as head of children’s services in Cleveland, Power recommended Caroline Burnite, from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library and the Training School faculty. At that time, in 1904, the Cleveland Library’s great expansion was just beginning; by 1915, the library exuberantly reported a juvenile circulation of “thirteen times as many books as there are children in Cleveland of the reading age.” They got those books from the new branch libraries, where the children’s rooms averaged more than seventy seats (and some had over a hundred); but they borrowed them, as well, from far-flung stand-alone collections.

With her Pittsburgh experience, Burnite also established a Training Class for Children’s Librarians—where, students testified, her standards and beliefs, along with her commanding presence, marked them for life.

All the pathfinders were serious about children’s reading. Up with the classics, down with popular fiction. Down with fiction, up with nonfiction. Burnite thought, simultaneously, of the one and the many. “No books weak in social ideals should be furnished, provided we do not lose reading children by their elimination.” So some “mediocre” books should remain, from which children could be guided upward; the “reading ladder” was her idea. Similarly, older boys and girls should graduate to adult books as soon as they were ready, and every children’s room was provided with some. A boy reading an Alger-like sea story, for example, might be introduced to Captains Courageous—as, aptly, “the story of a rich boy who fell overboard from an ocean liner and was picked up by the crew of a fishing yacht.” The sequence concludes with Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, which Burnite describes as “difficult reading…[to] be used with discrimination.”

It’s become commonplace in recent times to characterize early librarians and editors as “guardians” or “minders” interested only in foisting middle-class standards on their charges. Rather, they saw good books as a path to freedom—a way of broadening minds, deepening sympathies, sharpening perceptions. Midway in the Burnite years in Cleveland, William Brett was killed in a freak streetcar accident and Linda Eastman, by his side at the time, became his successor—the first woman to head a major city library. In 1919, Burnite resigned to get married, and Effie Power returned to Cleveland for a second, golden stretch as head of children’s work.

In Pittsburgh, Power had a complement in Elva S. Smith, a serious woman of letters. Smith had graduated from the first training class in 1903, with varied California experience behind her, and she immediately became a presence as instructor in the school and cataloger at the library. Over the next four decades, Smith taught everything in the juvenile field—book selection, cataloging, bibliography, history of children’s literature and development of children’s work—and ultimately became head of the children’s department. She wrote the book, literally, on cataloging children’s books and compiled a remarkable syllabus, with full bibliographies, for the teaching of children’s lit from King Alfred to Kipling. The History of Children’s Literature, first published in 1937, was reprinted by ALA as late as 1980. Her students—in the library world and in publishing—were legion.

While Elva Smith was mining the past in Pittsburgh, Effie Power was looking ahead. “Our task is to reach all the children,” she said at ALA in 1925, and “to establish permanent interests; to train them to read books and to love books; and to relate their use of books and their general reading to their lives.” The next year she launched the Book Caravan, bringing the mobile library from the countryside to the city. “It…has a value as publicity when seen passing through the streets,” Power wrote, as well as usefulness in “carrying library materials to the indifferent.” Library administration and librarian training were specialties of Power’s; and Pittsburgh library school students routinely did their practicums in Cleveland. So did others, by choice—among them Mildred Batchelder, the future ALA children’s specialist, then a student at the New York State Library School. Unsurprisingly, Power was tapped by ALA, in 1930, to write the first textbook on Library Service for Children.

The 1920s was a period of relative plenty when children’s librarians, consolidating their gains, began to exert influence outside their immediate communities.  They had money to spend, or withhold, for books, and publishers listened. They had social concerns, as well, and the ability to advance them. In those interlocking areas, Power was, well, a power. When she protested racist usage in Doctor Dolittle, the author and publisher made the desired change; when she questioned Langston Hughes, whose work she had championed, on a harsh phrase in an essay, he found a solution satisfactory to both of them.

The combination of past and present in children’s librarianship can be encapsulated in Smith’s scholarship and Power’s activism.

The last scene brings most of the principals back on stage—writing or editing the kinds of books they wanted kids to read. Books of traditional literature, mainly: collections of fairy tales and folk tales, of myths and legends; anthologies of poetry; compilations of holiday verse and lore. Olcott was the most prolific, turning out some two dozen volumes over the years, but Smith and Power contributed their share. All told, children’s librarians had produced almost ninety children’s books by 1929, including some original fiction, according to Children’s Library Yearbook Number One. Several of the other authors hailed from Cleveland or Pittsburgh, or both.

Singly and together, Cleveland and Pittsburgh created children’s services from the ground up, and then showed others how. It was an inspired work—inspired, it’s fair to say, by the children. A 1922 report from a Cleveland branch reports on a neighborhood “two-thirds Hungarian, with an admixture of Bohemian, Jewish, Italian and American borrowers—good readers all.”

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Presented by the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, A Sense of Wonder: Stories of Nature, Science & History is a one-day conference to be held on Thursday, April 5, for teachers and school librarians. Speakers will include Sy Montgomery, Wendell Minor, Anita Silvey and Catherine Thimmesh. For more information, see the professional development page on the Library’s web site at http://www.jfklibrary.org/Education/Teachers/Professional-Development.aspx

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photo: National Geographic

Rick Bowers’s previous book, Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. The journalist and historian’s latest offering is another compellingly told and meticulously researched account of events surrounding the civil rights battle. Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate uses the appeal of popular culture to illuminate social movements, mass media, and historical research. The result is a complex history of organizations guided by both ideology and profit, people both well-meaning and flawed, and shifts in popular sentiment. Along the way, Bowers demonstrates how a historian works, digging past myths, examining original archives, and reaching tentative conclusions about what happened and why.

1. You went deep into archives on the battle over civil rights to write your last book, Spies of Mississippi (discussed here). Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan is about the intersection of that history with superhero pop-culture. How much did you have to learn about the world of comics?

Rick Bowers: I had to immerse myself in the history of comic books in general and in the Superman character in particular.

Superman was first dubbed the “champion of the oppressed” and only later became famous as the champion of truth, justice, and the American way. The original Superman had a strong social conscience that led him to thwart wife beaters, corrupt politicians, greedy industrialists, foreign dictators, and Nazi spies.

Spawned during the FDR years, Superman was a super New Dealer who stood up for the little guy and believed we could all work toward a better world. He reflected the ideals of the New Deal and the hopes and aspirations of immigrants.

Given all that history it figures that the Man of Steel would one day take on the men of hate. Superman was shaped as a force for openness and fairness and a positive future for all. The K.K.K. was openly anti-Semitic, hostile to liberal democracy, and wanted to turn the clock back.

2. The Superman radio shows at the center of your book were featured in Freakonomics in 2005, but then that book’s authors retracted the story as a myth. How did you go about finding out what most likely happened?

RB: I had the advantage of beginning my research in the wake of the Freakonomics kerfuffle. That debate suggested that the popular version of events was probably not one hundred percent accurate and challenged me to find the most important facts.

Sure enough, numerous documents showed that the basic story of Superman vs. the K.K.K. was true but that certain fabrications had become accepted as fact and had muddied the historical record.

This required me to establish the core facts and stick to those.

FACT 1: In 1946 the producers of The Adventures of Superman radio show aired a sixteen-part series entitled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” It pitted the Man of Steel against a thinly veiled version of the K.K.K. that fooled no one. The series was widely praised for teaching tolerance to millions of kids and striking a blow against bigotry. The episodes were very well researched and contained highly realistic descriptions of K.K.K. activities and beliefs.

FACT 2: Activist Stetson Kennedy had made a career out of getting very close to the K.K.K. and then revealing their secrets to civil rights groups, liberal journalists, and law enforcement. Kennedy was also cited in various publications as a source of information to the Superman radio show for the anti-Klan broadcasts.

THE MYTH: Kennedy (and others) claimed that the shows revealed secret K.K.K. code words that had been gleaned from Klan meetings in Atlanta. As a result, (the story went), Klan leaders had to change their passwords after each episode, much to the dismay of the disgruntled membership. This was first reported in a national magazine in the late1940s and was further embellished by Kennedy in his book The Klan Unmasked.

The reality is that “Clan of the Fiery Cross” — while dramatic and to a degree realistic—did not contain actual code words and did not force the Klan to scurry about changing their code words. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the Superman producers for creating such a powerful program and to give a nod to the anti-Klan efforts of Stetson Kennedy — even if he was prone to exaggeration and tended to grab credit.

3. What were a couple of your biggest surprises in researching and writing this book?

RB: One big revelation was the significant influence of Jewish publishers, artists, and writers on the first comic books. I was fascinated to learn that the Superman character was created by a couple of Jewish teenagers in Cleveland during the Great Depression. At that time Jews were largely kept out of mainstream publishing by prejudice and had to find their own niche. The fledgling comic book business was not yet big enough to attract the interest of mainstream publishers and Jews could operate in that space. As a result Jewish publishers and artists gave us many of our most important superheroes and characters.

I was also surprised at just how controversial comic books were. Even Superman was condemned by critics as a Nazi-style vigilante who used violence to solve problems. Wonder Woman was derided as the very opposite of decent womanhood. By the time the crime and horror comics came along censorship was viewed as the only solution.

4. A fair amount of your book follows Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, though by 1946 they no longer controlled the character and were about to break with DC Comics. How did you decide to keep them as part of your civil-rights story?

RB: Jerry and Joe deserve all the credit for creating a character with a social conscience — an all-powerful being with a burning desire to stand by the little guy and to crusade for a better world. All the artists and producers to come after the publication of those first comic books were standing on their shoulders. So even as Jerry and Joe planned their embittered departure from DC Comics, the Superman character was still carrying out a mission established back in 1938.

Jerry and Joe had not set out to change the world, but they did more than their part to make it better.

5. In a real fight, who would win: 1940s Superman or the K.K.K.?

RB: Hands down: Superman. An actual being with superhuman strength, the power of flight, and X-ray vision would defeat a band of bigots in sheets and hoods in short order. First of all a fully unleashed Superman would have done what the authorities should have been doing — catch the Klansmen in the midst of their criminal acts and bring them to justice for all to see. He also would have nabbed the politicians and police officials who protected the Klan and exposed them as the hypocrites they were. And he would have explained to the whole world that all people deserve equal rights and respect, and those who seek to deny it are wrong. In the end the hooded hatemongers would have no hiding place — and the world would be a better place.

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In Ivy + Bean: No News Is Good News, the girls want some cash, and Bean’s dad suggests they create a newspaper about life on Pancake Court. After they successfully collect money from their neighbor-subscribers, the friends realize they had better go find some newsworthy stories — and do they ever. Like Ivy and Bean, author Annie Barrows and illustrator Sophie Blackall feed off each other’s creativity with hilarious results in this eighth entry in one of the funniest young chapter book series around. (6–9 years)

Gooney Bird on the Map, written by Lois Lowry and illustrated by Middy Thomas, is the fifth book in the series. With February break on everyone’s mind, the conversation in Gooney Bird Greene’s second grade class constantly turns to three students’ fabulous vacation destinations. In this story about a sensitive subject, big-hearted Gooney Bird predictably comes up with the perfect group project to help everyone happily refocus on schoolwork. (6–9 years)

In Friends: Snake and Lizard, the beguiling pair introduced in Snake and Lizard now share a burrow and are business partners, too, “Helper and Helper.” Different as their habits and appetites are, their relationship involves the ongoing negotiation that gives this chronicle much of its humor. The two bicker constantly; still, the outcomes are fair, reasonable, and often capped with a delightfully ironic twist. Gavin Bishop’s colorful spot art reinforces the affectionate characterizations and the humor in this wise and funny text by Joy Cowley. (7–10 years)

Though not part of a series, Kindred Souls will be warmly greeted by Patricia MacLachlan’s many fans. Ten-year-old Jake has a close relationship with his grandfather, eighty-eight-year-old Billy. The mysterious arrival of a stray dog that glues itself to Billy adds a touch of magic that hangs in the air after Billy’s death, when we hear a rumor of a stray dog turning up at an ailing woman’s home in the next town. These are time-sculpted themes, and MacLachlan gives them her particular stamp of plain speaking and poetry. (7–10 years)

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In Jennifer E. Smith’s The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, Hadley misses her flight to London, where she’s grudgingly going to her father’s wedding. She meets Oliver, a charming Brit, on the next flight. Their in-flight bonding culminates in a mind-blowing kiss at the airport — and then Hadley loses Oliver in the crowd. This elegant romance features a determined heroine who’s not afraid to make her own destiny. (14 years and up)

Daniel Handler’s remarkable novel Why We Broke Up is written as a (very long) letter quirky narrator Min plans to leave on her ex-boyfriend Ed’s doorstep, along with a box of tokens of their relationship (illustrated sparingly by Maira Kalman). Through Min’s eloquent thoughts on the significance of each item, readers come to understand both why the couple broke up, and why that outcome is not what matters most in this story. (14 years and up)

Hazel has stage four cancer and doesn’t know how much time she has left. Augustus lost a leg to osteosarcoma but seems to be in recovery. After meeting in a cancer support group, the two quickly develop a relationship that’s as profoundly intellectual as it is emotional and physical. With its acerbic comedy, sexy romance, and meditation on life and death, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is funny, heartbreaking, and honest. (14 years and up)

In Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff, lines of sexuality and gender are intentionally blurred; connections in an alternative family of punk-rock street kids are strong and clear. Androgynous drummer Kid falls for guitarist Felix, but a devastating fire claims both Felix and their abandoned warehouse “home.” Though Kid feels lost without Felix, with another summer comes sweet-voiced singer Scout — and another chance at love. (14 years and up)

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In Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld’s Secrets of the Garden: Food Chains and the Food Web in Our Backyard, narrator Alice tells readers how her family grows edible plants, raises chickens, and interacts with a variety of living things in their backyard garden. Information about composting, plant life cycles, food chains and food webs, and nutrition is included; science-savvy cartoon chickens directly address readers throughout, explaining underlying facts. Priscilla Lamont’s cheery illustrations portray the changes over the growing season. (5–8 years)

North: The Amazing Story of Arctic Migration by Nick Dowson introduces young readers to the Arctic’s part-time residents: those that migrate to the region for the summer months in the Northern hemisphere, including whales from Mexico, narwhals from Europe, Canadian caribou, snow geese, and terns from Antarctica. Patrick Benson’s luminous watercolor with pen and pencil illustrations, spread out beautifully on the oversized pages, capture the graceful movements of the migrating groups as they pass through lower latitude forests, oceans, and skies. (7–10 years)

Nicola Davies’s Talk, Talk, Squawk!: A Human’s Guide to Animal Communication presents the ways in which animals communicate through the use of color and pattern recognition, smells, sounds, and chemical exchanges. Her friendly, conversational tone makes the complex ideas remarkably clear and understandable, and Neal Layton’s cartoon illustrations, complete with humorous communications from the anthropomorphized animals, neatly underscore the important scientific messages in each section. (7–10 years)

For a middle-grade audience, Laurence Pringle’s Billions of Years, Amazing Changes: The Story of Evolution traces developments in the fields of geology and biology that led to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as well as subsequent discoveries. Pringle’s accessible explanations of such concepts as natural selection and genetic mutations are woven through the book. Color photographs and diagrams of flora and fauna accompany the text, as well as Steve Jenkins’s wonderfully detailed cut-paper animal illustrations and portraits of scientists. (9–12 years)

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Rick Bowers’s 2010 book Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement is an intriguing look at how the supporters of segregation — in the form of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission — gained and enforced their considerable power. Chronologically ordered, the volume climaxes with James Meredith’s enrollment in the University of Mississippi in 1962, a story Bowers tells with journalistic immediacy. Appended documents from the actual commission allow the evidence to speak for itself. (12 years and up)

Black & White: The Confrontation Between Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Eugene “Bull” Connor by Larry Dane Brimner (a 2012 Sibert Award honor book) looks at 1950s and 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, a city that earned its nickname “Bombingham.” At the heart of the violence were the often bloody confrontations between the forces of K.K.K. target Reverend Shuttlesworth and segregationist Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene Connor. Brimner’s well-researched text relies on a variety of primary-source documents, including FBI files and oral histories, to chronicle events. The many well-captioned photos and pull-quotes enhance the presentation. (12 years and up)

Comics and race take center stage in Best Shot in the West: The Adventures of Nat Love, a graphic novel by Patricia C. McKissack and Fredrick L. McKissack Jr. Nat Love, a contemporary of Billy the Kid, was born a slave in 1854 Tennessee and eventually gained his freedom. An expert in breaking any horse, Nat won acceptance as a cowboy and mastered sharpshooting, driving, and roping. While the fictional story uses maps, letters, and longer stretches of prose, the book knows when to rely on Randy DuBurke’s vivid, well-paced color illustrations to move the story forward. (10 years and up)

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