| From
the September/October 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Girls and Boys
 e
have called this special issue “Boys and Girls” in tribute
to where the Horn Book’s great adventure began, as
the newsletter of Bertha
Mahony’s Bookshop
for Boys and Girls, est. 1916. But as someone who came of age with
the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, I’m anxious that we
not be seen as favoring one gender over the other, hence the reversal
in the title of this editorial.
Although Harry Potter (whose latest and
last volume is reviewed
in this issue) has confounded any number of stereotypes about who
reads what, it remains true that what we think of as “children’s
literature” is read more by girls than by boys, despite many
attempts (most recently and notably by Jon Scieszka, interviewed
beginning on page 445) to redress the balance. The tension between
serving readers and creating readers is one thing that keeps children’s
literature so lively; another is the books, writers, and readers
that insistently remind us that we read and imagine as individuals
first. Taken together, the stories told by children’s and
YA writers in the “Little Women, Little Men” essays
found throughout this issue present a reasonable spectrum of how
one’s gender affects one’s reading. Taken singly, though,
each shows how reading happens one person at a time.
You can’t tell the gender of the child created
by Tomie dePaola — himself one of children’s literature’s
most felicitous philosophers of what it means to be a boy or a girl
— for our cover, and that’s on purpose. Reading allows
us to independently and privately assume whatever (not whichever)
gender we like, to see how it looks from a different side. Remember
the old man in Mordicai Gerstein’s The Mountains of Tibet?
When allowed to decide what kind of life he wanted for his next
incarnation, he chose the one he just had — with only the
revision of his gender, a difference at once small and profound.
We hope this issue allows our readers plenty of scope to ponder
the wisdom of his choice.
From the September/October 2007 issue of
The Horn Book Magazine |
