From the September/October 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Editorial
It’s All Good

K, so it’s not. We’re drowning in fat fantasy trilogies that all promise to be the Next Big Thing (or, if truth be told, the next big thing that’s just like the last big thing). In fact, with nigh on ten thousand children’s and YA books now being published each year, we’re drowning in books, period. Sometimes, faced with cart after cart loaded with upper-age-range novels (where have all the picture books gone? ditto, younger fiction?), Roger Sutton and I feel like Lucy and Ethel in that I Love Lucy episode set in a candy factory. They’re an assembly line of two, languidly wrapping chocolates trickling by on the conveyor belt...but then the chocolates start coming faster and faster, then impossibly fast — and that’s where the comparison ends, because unlike the madcap redhead and her blowsy sidekick, we can’t eat the books in order to stanch the flow. (We are bookworms, but only metaphorically.) Or, to choose an example more appropriate for the children’s book field, today’s overbooked publishing climate could be compared with the relentless donut machine in Homer Price. But you get the idea. If only we had a contraption like the one on our cover, designed so ingeniously by Arthur Geisert and manned so efficiently by his signature little pigs. . . .

But no. Despite the preponderance of references to assembly lines and machinery in the preceding paragraph, “good” can’t be identified or quantified by a machine (or even, alas, pigs). Deciding what’s good is a human endeavor. So how do we go about it? What distinguishes a good book from a mediocre one, or worse? After all, the notion of good is subjective, definable only as a point on a continuum, and for every book published there’s somebody out there who loves it — even if it’s just the author and her writers’ group. So what does make a good book?

For this special issue, we approached that ambitious, possibly unanswerable question head-on and sideways, on different levels and from varied points of view. Some of our contributors were asked to grapple with mind-blowingly large themes: Deborah Stevenson, in our keynote essay, addresses the plurality of meanings of the word good; Betsy Hearne takes up the gauntlet Roger rather cheekily threw down, viz.: “What’s a girl to do when a book comes along that seems, in some way, like nothing that’s been published before?” Kate O’Sullivan provides an editor’s perspective; Roger reveals what a star next to a review really stands for; and Susan Cooper pays tribute to an institution that for twenty years has been an “uncompromising celebration of excellence.”

We asked other contributors to focus on a single, specific aspect of literary goodness. The nine “What Makes a Good...?” entries in this issue range from what makes a good beginning (Richard Peck) to what makes a good ending (Virginia Euwer Wolff), with an eclectic mix of topics — i.e., thrillers (Nancy Werlin), books for second graders (Robin Smith), translated books (Arthur A. Levine), Holocaust books (Hazel Rochman) — in between.

We hope this smorgasbord will aid Horn Book readers in the never-ending, nebulous, yet necessary search for “good.” To that end, we plan to make the topic-specific pieces an ongoing feature. Look for “What Makes a Good . . .?” columns on easy readers, dinosaur books, bilingual picture books, series nonfiction, and more in future issues of the magazine and on the Horn Book website, www.hbook.com. We hope you’ll weigh in with suggestions. That would be — what else? — good.

—Martha V. Parravano