From the March/April 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Letters to the Editor

I enjoyed Jon Scieszka’s Zena Sutherland Lecture (“What’s So Funny, Mr. Scieszka?” November/December 2005) and would like to answer his challenge, “What was the last funny book to win a Newbery?” with the year 2000’s winner, Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy.

But how many others have there been? Well, I don’t believe that we should be surprised or indignant that more names don’t fall trippingly off the tongue. A funny book is much harder to write than a tragic book, so of course there are fewer superb ones. One reason for this difference, I believe, is that there is considerably more agreement on what is grievous than on what is funny. Certain things are tragic whatever the reader’s age, gender, income bracket, nationality, and political or religious leaning. And these tragedies are grievous the tenth time they are brought to our attention, and the hundredth. Humor, on the other hand, relies in some measure on surprise. If one must read and reread a book, to compare it with other nominated books, the tragic one stays painful; the funny one may get to be a chore. Maybe a painstaking committee, such as the librarians who pick Newbery winners, gravitate to gravitas partly for this reason.

Full disclosure: Of the three children’s books I have published since the creation of the Kentucky Bluegrass Award, only the first and third were nominated. I was unofficially told that number two, Kate of Still Waters (which dealt with the farm crisis), was skipped because the committee felt that “its humor detracted from its stature.”

Martha Bennett Stiles
Paris, Kentucky

I have been reading the Horn Book for most of my professional life and have always had great respect for your commitment to quality literature for children. As the Horn Book is one of the few magazines that critically and honestly reviews children’s books for their writing quality, I have long sought out your reviews, even if I haven’t always agreed with them.

Thus it was with extreme disappointment and disgust that I read Anita L. Burkam’s review of Eldest by Christopher Paolini. Ms. Burkam’s review wasn’t so much a review as a glorified plot summary: most of the review was spent either summarizing what she thought of Eragon or giving plot details of Eldest. Only the very last sentence gave any kind of true opinion about the book, and it was, quite frankly, inconclusive. For example, she calls Paolini’s writing in Eragon “immature and derivative” but then later says that Eldest “fulfill[s] the promise latent in his first book.” It seems to me that she contradicted herself: first stating that Eragon is poorly written, and then later declaring that it had latent promise. A writer can write poorly but still show promise, and if that is how Ms. Burkam truly felt, she should have made her earlier statements about Eragon clearer. The point of a review is to actually give the reader some sense of the reviewer’s opinion of the book. After reading Ms. Burkam’s review, I was left with no idea about what she truly thought about Eldest and I wondered if she’d simply given up, deciding that no matter what she wrote, the book would still be a bestseller.

I would never have expected to see a review like this in the Horn Book: normally, your reviewers make their opinions clear and I always finish a review knowing exactly how the reviewer felt about the book. It shocks and saddens me that you chose to publish such a vague review of such a popular book. If the Horn Book, that bastion of literary excellence, cannot be trusted to honestly critique children’s books, then what are we, as readers and purchasers, left with to help us?

Necia Velenchenko
Lynnfield, Massachusetts

Roger Sutton responds:
I’m sorry Ms. Velenchenko was “disappointed and disgusted” by our review of Eldest. Our intent was to acknowledge the book’s strengths (good storytelling) and weaknesses (immature prose) — something many reviews do without accusations of self-contradiction. Ms. Velenchenko also sees an excess of summarization in the review, but reviews of sequels need to examine the new book in the context of the original, and given this constraint the review’s balance between plot summary and critical commentary seems right to me.

Betty Carter (“Privacy, Please” September/October 2005) wrote wisely about the importance of private reading. Her cautionary words about the deadening effects of too much adult intrusion in book selection and in guiding responses to books have broader implications.

That remarkable teacher Sylvia Ashton-Warner once wrote about choosing school staff: “The first quality to seek is self-effacement . . . a receptivity to the other person, an ability to listen.”

But both Ashton-Warner’s point and Carter’s warning that adult insistence on the “usefulness” of fiction can corrupt private reading pleasure are at odds with current educational constraints. Many school policies now seem to imply that learning occurs only when an adult, mouth open, is with a child, mouth closed. It’s hard for adults — who know so much, who want so much to give!—to back off. But the truth is that much of what is well-learned people teach themselves.

If children whose classrooms now focus so urgently and narrowly on No Child Left Behind test preparation are to learn to think for themselves, they need privacy of the mind. Children should be allowed plenty of quiet, hassle-free time in their day.

Judy K. Morris
Washington, D.C.

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