| From
the May/June 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Who Is This For?
 hat
question can at times be asked cynically in these offices, as when
we are confronted with yet another picture book aimed at besotted
grandparents. But sometimes we are genuinely stumped. In this issue
we were struck by the number of novels that prompted questions of
audience. Who, for instance, is the intended reader of a Holocaust
novel in which one character is seven and the other is forty-something?
Or a book featuring a thirteen-year-old protagonist that, among
other things, movingly and sometimes hilariously chronicles the
life, slow decline, and death of a nonagenarian twin (who, by the
way, swears like a lumberjack)? Or a YA novel whose ensemble cast
has the reader connecting on a profound level not just with a seventeen-year-old
girl but also a five-year-old, a seventy-six-year-old, and several
middle-aged characters in between?
What Mirjam Pressler’s Malka, Polly
Horvath’s The Canning Season, and Martha Brooks’s
True Confessions of a Heartless Girl have in common is
that they are all enormously enriched by their adult characters.
These adults exist not just in relation to the young characters
but as completely rounded players in their own right, with hopes
and regrets, vices and virtues; even love lives. Whether the child
reader is ready for it or not, these books demand an acknowledgment
of the adult world; a recognition that life is complicated and interesting
not only at thirteen and seventeen but also at forty, and seventy-six,
and past ninety.
What does this newly insistent, humanized adult
presence in children’s books mean? Perhaps the authors of
these novels should have considered publishing in the adult market.
On the other hand, children’s books have always been a refuge
for works that don’t quite fit anywhere else (viz. Alan Garner’s
Stone Book Quartet). There’s another possibility, as Jennifer
Brabander suggests in her review of the Brooks: that books such
as these may, by bringing adult characters whole into the stories’
spheres, help provide a transition to adult reading.
The thing is, all this speculation would be moot
if these novels weren’t any good. Then the question of audience
would be easy: they’re not for anyone. But in fact these are
some of the best books reviewed in the issue. So maybe we should
welcome the blurring of the lines, the filling-in of the sphere.
And maybe one (very partial) answer to the question Who is this
for? is, If it’s that good, does it really matter?
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