Cindy:
Cinder (Feiwel, 2012), the first book in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. This futuristic Cinderella story is a mix of fairy tale, sci-fi, and romance — perfect for a wide female readership and certain to spark discussion and anticipation of future installments. Watch your back, Hunger Games, this series could be the next big thing. My second choice for mothers and daughters to read together would be Kekla Magoon’s 37 Things I Love (in no particular order) (Holt, 2012) for its honest first-person portrayal of a teenage girl’s coming of age as she deals with death, hope, love, and friendship.

Elissa:
Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming (Random/Schwartz and Wade, 2011). It’s suspenseful, informative, and accessible; readers will come away with a fresh view of the feisty, pioneering woman and the events leading up to — and following — her disappearance.

Kitty:
Libba Bray’s hilarious and sharply observant Beauty Queens (Scholastic, 2011). A planeload of beauty pageant contestants crashes on what looks like a deserted island. The scope of the plot is mind-boggling — the girls are ultimately pawns in a massive global conspiracy — but the quieter message about the power unleashed when teen girls think society isn’t watching will resonate across generations. Bray’s narration of the audiobook edition is a tour-de-force performance.

Katrina:
The mature topics in Girl in the Mirror (Persea, 2013) by Meg Kearney will appeal to older teens (and give mothers a jumping-off point for discussion), but it’s as much about mother-daughter bonds and connection to family — both adopted and birth in this case. Ideal for girls with adopted, single-parent, or other unconventional family backgrounds. Its verse narrative will likely be a new and exciting format for teens and moms to explore together.

Katie:
The women in Wren’s family manifest magical powers when they reach puberty. Wren uses hers to bring her boyfriend Danny back from the dead, but then meets (living) Gabriel, who’s drawn to her gift. Although romance takes center stage in Amy Garvey’s Cold Kiss (HarperTeen, 2011), Garvey weaves female familial relationships as intricately as Wren creates her spell. The complex dynamics between three generations of magical women (think a YA Practical Magic) add depth — and plenty for teen girls and their moms to discuss.

Martha:
How about A. S. King’s Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown, 2012)? Protagonist Astrid is taking a class in the Socratic method at her close-minded, small-town high school, and so she spends the year “asking questions and not rushing to answer them” — an illuminating time for her, and an ideal springboard for book discussion. Is she gay? Or just in love with one particular girl? Once she determines her identity, should she hide it, like her best friend? Astrid makes some pretty crucial choices in the book, and readers will be right there to see why, and how; through the interspersed airplane interludes (Astrid spends a lot of time looking up at the sky and sending questions and love to the passengers on airplanes) readers get glimpses into other lives, just as full of struggle and conflict and not-easy answers as Astrid’s life is. Finally, seeing as this is a mother/teen daughter read-together, Astrid’s relationship with her (nightmare of a) mother would certainly provoke discussion…

Roger:
I think Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity (Hyperion, 2012) would be an excellent choice; it’s the kind of YA book that makes a great adult crossover. While the story — a WWII thriller about two young women — is plenty exciting on its own, the narrative structure is tricky and would be fun to talk about.

Shara:
Pearl (called Bean) and her best friend Henry are comfortable with their respective familial dysfunctional in Pearl (Holt, 2011) by Jo Knowles, but the revelation of long-kept family secrets exposes the corrosive effect that silence can have on relationships. Homosexuality, friendship, and romance are just a few of the topics tackled by this dramatic novel.

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Rookie Magazine, an online magazine aimed at teenage girls, was created to address the lack of teen magazines that “respect reader’s intelligence,” as Tavi writes in the introduction. Rookie attracts more than teenagers though; Tavi and the rest of the Rookie Mag board snag interviews and essays from Joss Whedon, Lena Dunham, Miranda July, Aubrey Plaza, David Sedaris, Dan Savage, and Zooey Deschanel, among others.

Rookie Yearbook One is organized by the online magazine’s monthly themes such as secrets, transformation, and exploration. Fresh, unapologetic articles and personal stories cover movies, music, style, relationships, drugs, and general interest (for example, the “Literally the Best Thing Ever” series of articles, featuring deep-sea creatures and outer space). Two of my favorite pieces were “How to Not Care What Other People Think of You,” and “How to Approach the Person You Like Without Throwing Up,” both rife with advice that would have made my high school days easier. Fashion photo shoots and clips of style icons, movie characters, and music moguls mix with wallpaper flowers, lace, and glitter in the collage-style design. Yearbook photos, signatures, and notes fill the inside covers. And this compilation includes stickers, a plastic record of Rookie tunes, and a paper crown—what more could any burgeoning fashion icon want?

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Silvey’s arguments are not new; they’re just the most recent version of a decades-old debate. Controversy has dogged the Newbery Medal from its inception, always coming in the form of pointed attacks from those outside the process who are critical of the books selected for the award. Who could have guessed, when bookseller Frederic G. Melcher created the award in 1921, that people would come to care so quickly and so deeply about the books deemed “most distinguished”? That was what Melcher wanted, but I doubt it was his intention to stir things up from the get-go when he made the decision to put the award selection into the hands not of booksellers or teachers but of children’s librarians.

According to the history of the award, as told by Melcher himself, the idea for a children’s book award came to him suddenly in the midst of a meeting of the Children’s Librarians’ Section of the American Library Association (ALA) at its Annual Conference in Swampscott, Massachusetts, in 1921. He was there to promote the concept of Children’s Book Week, which he had launched with Franklin W. Mathiews, chief librarian of the Boy Scouts of America, two years earlier. “It was a great opportunity for Book Week’s pro¬motion,” recalled Melcher years later.

As I looked down from the platform at the three or four hundred people, I thought of the power they could have in encouraging the joy of reading among children. I could see that I was sure of having the librarians’ cooperation in Children’s Book Week, but I wanted to go further and secure their interest in the whole process of creating books for children, producing them, and bringing them to the children.(2)

Those most invested in Children’s Book Week at that time were booksellers, who hoped to reach parents as consumers with their campaign “More Books in the Home”—just in time for the Christmas shopping season. In 1921, children’s librarianship was still a relatively new profession, and Melcher wisely saw librarians as potential partners in getting this message out. Despite the fact that the influential children’s library leader Anne Carroll Moore had served on the Children’s Book Week committee from the beginning, other members of her profession were not entirely enthusiastic about what some booksellers were doing. At the same 1921 ALA meeting in Swampscott, the head of the Children’s Librarians’ Section, Clara Whitehill Hunt from Brooklyn Public Library, told those assembled:

I saw, last November, big advertisements of the “Week” which noted, along with excellent titles, many books which no good public library places on its shelves. I saw the names of speakers who were to appear in a certain book department each day of the week, and most of the speakers were authors whose books the ALA would not dream of putting on its approved lists.(3)

The Gimbels Book Week ad, November 1920.

A search through the New York Times during the second week of November 1920 turns up exactly the advertisements to which Hunt referred. “Kiddies! This Is Your Book Week! Bring Along the Grown-Ups to the Gimbel Celebration…You’ll find ’em all at Gimbels—so carefully selected you can’t choose wrong.” Included among the “carefully selected” books were Adventures of the Teenie Weenies and three volumes of the Boy Mechanic (“Here’s the book for any wide-awake boy”[4]). In the other ad Hunt referenced, Bloomingdales presented their program of author speakers not recommended by the ALA. For the record, they were: David Cory (author of Billy Bunny); Henry C. Walker (author of the Jimmy Bunn stories); Frank Parker Stockbridge (author of Yankee Ingenuity in the War); Dorothy Whitehill (author of the Polly Pendleton series, Twin series, etc.); Lillian E. Garis (author of the Girl Scout series); William Heyliger (author of the St. Mary, Fairview, and Boy Scouts series); Howard R. Garis (author of the Uncle Wiggly series), and Horace Wade, “the eleven-year-old author of In the Shadow of the Great Peril.”(5)

These were the very types of books children’s librarians railed against in their selection standards. Hunt herself included more than one reference to popular formula series fiction, other¬wise known at the time as “fifty-cent books,” in her list of “Don’ts” in book selection. She wrote, for example: “Don’t let those adults who point pridefully to themselves as products of a trash-reading childhood shake your determination to give today’s children better mental food than those worthy citizens had.”(6) Earlier, in a statement that echoes eerily in modern times, Hunt had explained why she thought it was so important to offer children better books: “Just so surely as America neglects to fill her children’s minds with good ideas, just so surely will those children, a few years hence, be swayed by every shrieking demagogue and yellow journal working to undermine our country.”(7)

By giving the Children’s Librarians’ Section the power to select the Newbery Medal winners, Melcher got their support for Children’s Book Week by assuring them that children’s librarians would become the key tastemakers. Just a year after her criticism of the way Children’s Book Week was taking form under Melcher’s watch, Hunt had only laudatory words for him as he handed her the first Newbery Medal to present to Hendrik Willem van Loon for The Story of Mankind. “We feel strong and powerful because you believe in us and are putting in our hands a weapon, one of the most potent of our times—publicity of the best kind.”(8)

From a children’s librarian’s standpoint, the Newbery Medal promised to lift children’s literature to higher standards, or, as pioneering children’s editor May Massee described it, to “rescue it from mediocrity.”(9) Given this, it’s not surprising that popularity was not a criterion for selection—in fact, quite the opposite. To these librarians, popularity meant “poor style, poor binding, narrow margins, pulpy paper.”(10) Rather, the focus for the Newbery Medal has always been on distinguished books—whatever “distinguished” means to the group of children’s librarians making the selection each year. From the beginning, the term was left intentionally vague: “Because creative talent cannot and should not be confined to any pattern, the words ‘most distinguished’ were wisely undefined and unqualified, so that no limitations were placed upon the character of the book.”(11) But the terms have always included a sentence about what “distinguished” does not mean: “The award is not for popularity.”(12)

While the Newbery Medal, for the most part, was widely embraced almost immediately by librarians, teachers, publishers, booksellers, the press, and the general public, there was one group that was, not surprisingly, unhappy with the award: those who wrote popular series fiction. The authors of “boys’ books,” in particular, grumbled about the “blood-thirsty”(13) librarians who knew nothing about real boys and what their reading interests were. How could these women possibly be entrusted to decide what books were best for children? (And by children, of course, they meant boys.) Louise Latimer, director of work with children at the Washington, DC, Public Library, addressed these sorts of charges in a talk she gave to the Children’s Librarians’ Section at the 1924 Annual Conference in Saratoga Springs, New York.

I believe I can go further and assert that few fathers, if any, and few leaders of boys, if any, could tell you as accurately and sympathetically—not sentimentally, mind you—what a boy likes to read as a children’s librarian of many years’ experience. This is not remarkable, for more boys and boys of more types pass thru her hands, and she has their own testimony to support her opinions.

We cannot help but recognize, however, that the points of view connoted in these expressions (“high-brow,” “old maid,” etc.), have made a consistent approach to standards difficult. Have we let such criticism lower our standards in book selection? It is only as we have done that or as it has weakened our position in the community as judges of reading for young people that such criticism matters.(14)

Latimer’s last comment is especially interesting in light of the early criticism of the Newbery Award winners. At the time of her writing, there had been only three winners selected: The Story of Mankind, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and The Dark Frigate—robust nonfiction, humorous fantasy/adventure, and a high-sea adventure. All were written by male authors and have a distinctly male point of view. A critic at the time would have been hard-pressed to claim that none of these were “boys’ books.” In fact, the next five Newbery Medal books were all written from male perspectives by male authors, and they include a war story (Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon), a Western (Smoky, the Cowhorse), and historical fiction (The Trumpeter of Krakow), all mainstays in the reading preferences of boys. Were children’s librarians involved in the earliest selection of Newbery Medal books subconsciously looking for books to counter the charges, as Latimer feared might happen?

“Robust” boy books of the 1920s.

We’ll probably never know, but what happened over the next ten years is curious. After nearly a decade’s worth of boys’ books written by male authors, the second decade of Newbery Medal winners were all written by women, and many of them were classified as girls’ books in their times. By 1939, author Howard Pease had had enough. As an invited speaker at an ALA preconfer¬ence on children’s reading hosted by the Section for Library Work with Children, the author best known for his high-sea adventure books (popular with boys) delivered what amounted to a misogynistic rant to an audience of four hundred children’s librarians, most of whom were women. He berated them for creating a children’s book world controlled by women and feminine values. He was especially critical of the books most prized by children’s librarians. “All the models held up today are girls’ books. All the qualities demanded of writers today are feminine qualities—the delicate, the fragile, the beautiful, the poetic, the whimsical, the quaint, the fairylike.”(15)

“Nostalgic” girl books of the 1930s.

Pease’s speech raised the eyebrows and the ire of the women in attendance who, understandably, found his remarks insulting. In his own report of the event, Frederic Melcher refuted the assertion that women are not good judges of “red-blooded” adventure stories and pointed out that fewer men write for children because there is less money in it. But, he noted, the successful children’s writer might make more money in the long run as the books bring in greater royalties over time. He put out a call for more men to write children’s books: “One of the objectives before publishers of children’s books may well be to find more men who have something to say and know how to write to compete in a field where women writers outnumber them two to one.”(16)

As the father of the Newbery Medal, Melcher artfully walked the fine line between both sides of the argument in an attempt to pacify librarians and authors, and that might have been the end of it. But a few months later, in the October 1939 issue of Elementary English Review, educator and school library advocate C. C. Certain stirred the pot again. In an editorial titled “What Are Little Boys Made Of?” he took on the Newbery Medal at full force, charging that the winners represented “a kind of faded prettiness,” particularly in the last decade. “Just imagine, if you can, the average tousle-headed American boy, or for that matter, his girl counterpart, sitting down for an hour to read Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright (Newbery Award, 1939), or Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer, or Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink…”(17) As the most recent Newbery winner at the time, Thimble Summer was held up as an example of a particularly bad Newbery Award winner. “Garnet [Thimble Summer’s protagonist] over and over again loses herself to young readers in mature reflection and adult parlance.”(18) Mr. Certain, on the other hand, was pleased with the Newbery choices of the 1920s, citing The Dark Frigate and The Story of Mankind as books he could imagine the “average American boy” reading “with zest.”(19) Although she was writing about different books, Silvey would make essentially the same argument nearly sixty years later in “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?” saying that the most recent winners were “particularly disappointing” especially in comparison to the winners from the previous decade, which were much more popular with children.

Certain revisited his complaints in the next issue of Elementary English Review, in an “Open Forum on the Newbery Award,” inviting readers to join him in a discussion of the award. He makes his own opinion clear: “The children themselves cannot but be disappointed in books that are so highly sentimental and reminiscent of childhood. Confronted with these award books, they will come to regard all literature as ‘sissy.’”(20)

Letters poured in to the Elementary English Review in response. Most, at least of those quoted in the April 1940 issue,(21) agreed with Certain’s arguments. And, like Certain, they believed the problem could be remedied by having teachers and school librarians choose the Newbery Medal winners instead. They felt that teachers were less likely to be sentimental and more likely to be in touch with the reading tastes and abilities of real children. There was a general agreement among those who wrote in that the Newbery Medal was being awarded by the wrong people to the wrong books, but Certain noted that few were brave enough to say so publicly. In fact, he wrote that many of the letters the Elementary English Review had received were anonymous. This also corresponds with Silvey’s report in which the people she interviewed would only speak out against the Newbery Medal on condition of anonymity. It’s not clear why teachers and school librarians—now or then—with valid concerns about how the Newbery Medal winner was selected were so afraid to speak out. Are children’s librarians really such a fearsome bunch? Howard Pease obviously didn’t think so.

The children’s librarians shot back with their own letters to the editor of the Elementary English Review, which were included in April 1940’s “Open Forum.” Quoted at length were letters from the chair and vice-chair of the Section for Library Work with Children, of particular interest because both would have been in leadership positions on the Newbery committee at that time. Irene Smith, who in 1940 was vice-chair of the Section for Library Work with Children and thus chair of the Newbery committee, revealed that she had written to Melcher, assuring him that “this year’s committee will seek earnestly for literary masculinity, but whether or not we shall find it remains to be seen.”(22) (What they found was Daniel Boone by James Daugherty, the 1940 winner. Literary masculinity was, in fact, found in the next four years as well, with Call It Courage, The Matchlock Gun, Adam of the Road, and Johnny Tremain.) A year later, in the May 1941 issue, more letters to the editor were printed under the title “The Newbery Award Again.” Betty Hamilton, a children’s librarian from Atlanta, called Certain on his sexism: “And why do the editor and others complain when a good book for girls wins the Medal? Why shouldn’t a girl’s book win? Don’t girls read?”(23)

The war of words continued for three years and even spilled over onto the pages of other journals. In 1942 the vice-chair of the Section for Library Work with Children, Clara E. Breed, asked for a “Plea for Understanding” in an article about the Newbery Medal she published in Wilson Library Bulletin. She was convinced that there would be less criticism of the Newbery Medal if people only understood the process by which it was chosen (something she explained in great detail) and the original purpose: to select the most distinguished book of the year.

Indeed the complaints about the Newbery Medal usually insist that the medal be something it is not. Elementary teachers say the books chosen are too old, junior high teachers that the books are too young. An author of boys’ books says the books are too feminine and too tender-minded. A parent objects that the selections too often have been books with foreign backgrounds. A school administrator suggests the books would be better made “if teachers, parents, children, and an artist or two were involved in the selection.” Sometimes it seems as if all these people had joined hands and were chanting in unison: “The Newbery books are not popular.” (When has Webster defined “most distinguished” as “most popular”?)[24]

In spite of the fact that the award terms have always made the award’s purpose clear, Breed and others who have come to the Newbery Medal’s defense have had to remind us again and again that it is not an award for popularity. The most recent defense came in 2008 in direct response to Silvey’s article and was pointedly titled “Captain Underpants Doesn’t Need a Newbery Medal.” Its author, Erica Perl, a children’s writer and elementary-school creative writing teacher, would have made Clara Whitehill Hunt proud: “We already have plenty of ways to track the most popular children’s books. Shouldn’t the field’s most prestigious honor aim higher?”(25)

Few librarians today would make the argument their forebears made that “trash reading” is somehow harmful to young readers. We would even hesitate to call popular formula series fiction “trash” these days. Most of us are perfectly comfortable with the idea of Captain Underpants keeping company on the shelves with Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Our attitude toward “popular” books has certainly changed since the Newbery Medal was first created, but our mission to find the most “distinguished book” of the year remains the same.

But why do we bother, when we are constantly reminded by Newbery critics that nobody wants to read most of the books that have won? “Who cares that the books aren’t popular?” asked the ever-provocative Dorothy Broderick back in 1960. She characterized the Newbery Medal as “a means of honoring an author who has offered an important insight in life. This gift of insight cannot be measured by the number of readers. If it can be measured at all, it is in terms of its impact on the few readers of each year or decade who come to it with the back¬ground and intelligence to absorb the author’s statement.”(26)

Has the Newbery lost its way? I don’t think so. It’s just more often than not chosen the road less traveled in its search for distinguished.

Endnotes
1. Silvey, Anita. “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?” School Library Journal 54:10 (October 2008), p. 40.
2. Melcher, Frederic G., quoted in A History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals by Irene Smith. Viking Press, 1957, p. 36.
3. Hunt, Clara Whitehill. “Children’s Book Week: A Librarian’s Point of View,” Publishers Weekly 100:1 (July 9, 1921), p. 69.
4. New York Times, November 17, 1920, p. 9.
5. New York Times, November 14, 1920, p. E 17.
6. Hunt, Clara Whitehill. Library Work with Children. Revised. (Manual of Library Economy Number XXIX) ALA. 1924, p. 6.
7. Hunt, Clara Whitehill, quoted in “Children’s Books,” by Wilhelmina Harper, The Library Journal 48:17 (October 1, 1923), p. 807.
8. Hunt, Clara Whitehill, quoted in A History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals by Irene Smith. Viking Press, 1957, p. 45.
9. Masee, May, quoted in “The Sayers Institute” by Claire Nolte, Library Journal 64:14 (August 1939), p. 588.
10. Hunt. Library Work with Children, p. 7.
11. Breed, Clara E. “The Newbery Medal: A Plea for Understanding,” Wilson Library Bulletin 16:9 (May 1942), p. 724.
12. “Newbery Medal Terms and Criteria,” Asso¬ciation for Library Service to Children website. Retrieved April 27, 2012. www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newberymedal/newberyterms/newberyterms.
13. Eaton, Walter Prichard. “How Much Red in the Boy’s Book?” Publisher’s Weekly 106:16 (October 18, 1924), p. 1375.
14. Latimer, Louise P. “They Who Get Slapped,” The Library Journal 49:13 (July 1924), p. 625.
15. Pease, Howard. “Children’s Books Today: One Man’s View,” Proceedings of the Institute on Library Work with Children. School of Librarianship/Uni¬versity of California, 1939, p. 7.
16. Melcher, Frederic G. “Men Wanted?” Publishers Weekly 136:1 (July 1, 1939), p. 7.
17. Certain, C. C. “What Are Little Boys Made Of?” Elementary English Review 16:6 (October 1939), p. 247.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. “Open Forum on the Newbery Award,” Elemen¬tary English Review 16:7 (November 1939), p. 283.
21. “The Newbery Award: Open Forum,” Elemen¬tary English Review 17:4 (April 1940), p. 160-162.
22. Smith, Irene. Letter to the Editor in “The Newbery Award: Open Forum,” Elementary English Review 17:4 (April 1940), p. 162.
23. Hamilton, Betty. Letter to the Editor in “The Newbery Award Again,” Elementary English Review 18:5 (May 1941), p. 193.
24. Breed. “The Newbery Medal: A Plea for Understanding,” p. 725.
25. Perl, Erica. “Captain Underpants Doesn’t Need a Newbery Medal,” Slate, December 19, 2008. Retrieved April 22, 2012. www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/12/captain_underpants_doesnt_need_a_newbery_medal.single.html.
26. Broderick, Dorothy M. “The Newbery Award Is Not a Popularity Contest,” Library Journal 85:6 (March 15, 1960), p. 1281.

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I just got to the part where Carmen, Lena, and Bridget arrive in Greece. I was not prepared for what happens next. And then the book was recalled to the library.

Has anyone else read it? Is it worth trying to check out again? Even if I’m not in the mood for a tear-jerker? No spoilers, if possible. (I know, the book’s not new, but still…)

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I was eleven years old when the Magnificent 7 dominated the 1996 summer games—the perfect age to marvel over the mysterious creatures that are competitive gymnasts. So tiny. So powerful. So much glitter hairspray. My favorite Olympian was thirteen-year-old Dominique Moceanu. I read and re-read her autobiography (Dominique Moceanu: An American Champion) so many times that I ran my paperback copy quite ragged.

Lucky for young fans, Moceanu is back in the book business with a new middle-grade series, The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts (Disney-Hyperion, April), co-written with Alicia Thompson. Seemingly created specifically for eleven-year-old me, this series follows four young gymnasts who train together at a fictional elite gym in Texas, with each girl taking turns as protagonist, Babysitter’s Club style. In the first title, Winning Team, Britt is the new girl at the gym. Her new teammates give her the cold shoulder because she is a show-off with a perfect full double-twisting somersault—don’t you hate those? But with life lessons gleaned from To Kill a Mockingbird, Britt avoids becoming the Boo Radley of the Texas Twisters by taming her sassy, self-centered ways.

Along with the inner emotional struggles of tweendom, Winning Team also reveals those coveted details of gymnast-life that only Moceanu could provide: the superhuman training schedules, the bizarre and disgusting athletic rituals, the catty in-fighting. The characters also speak in thick gymnast-dialect—you might need to spend some time on YouTube learning the difference between a “full-in” and a “half-in, half-out”. And let’s not forget the requisite eating disorder plotline! Don’t worry: by the end of the book, everyone has regained health and attained a sense of team spirit, and you’ll be more than prepared to cheer on the newest pack of little 2012 USA competitors this summer.

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I have never liked the lists of “boy books” and “girl books” that appear in libraries, parenting magazines, educational handouts, and even make up whole books themselves. There always seems to be a note included that the choices can be enjoyed by both genders, and yet there continue to be separate lists. As a feminist, it drives me crazy that we are still talking this way, but it is more than that. The separation doesn’t make sense to me because it does not match my experiences reading books with boys and girls.

I have been reading aloud to kids and discussing their reading in book groups, as well as reading with my sons, for the past fifteen years. I have yet to have a child tell me they disliked a book we have read because they thought it was either “for girls” or “for boys.” The secret is that it simply has to be a good book.

It is sad to think that girls who read the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and the books of Louisa May Alcott would miss out on reading Treasure Island or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Or vice versa.

When my boys were very young, I never gave the gender of characters a second thought. I just read as many wonderful stories as possible to them. I noticed that picture books had far more male characters than female. It doesn’t get more fun than Dr. Seuss, but there are few admirable heroines in his stories. I did not, however, notice my two sons caring whether the lead character was a male or female person, or for that matter, as was often the case, a male or female animal. Do we hold the animals in E. B. White’s books or those of Robert Lawson to rigid gender stereotypes? Do children think about the fact that Charlotte is a girl who is the truest friend to Wilbur, a boy? I don’t think that is their focus.

As my sons grew and we read more chapter books, the gender of the characters continued to make no difference. They loved the silly Pippi Longstocking and the fierce Ramona as much as they did little Sam Krupnik in Lois Lowry’s series. As a result, they had the opportunity to laugh at and admire kids not all that different from themselves. I remember the special joy they experienced when, as second graders, they could be hysterical about the antics of a preschooler. It was such fun to see them looking back at their past. And it made no difference if it was a boy or a girl; it just had to be funny. I don’t think kids care if the main characters in the Roald Dahl books are male or female; they eagerly jump from Charlie and James to Matilda and Sophie. The kids I know insist on reading them all.

In many of the early children’s classics we read, such as those of E. Nesbit, it is a group of children, both male and female, who have the major roles and adventures. C. S. Lewis sends two girls and two boys into the wardrobe to Narnia. Does anyone ask this gender question about Harry, Ron, and Hermione?

There are so many books I want to share with my sons that no matter how much reading we do (and we do a lot), I have lists in my head that we will never be able to complete together. That is what got me started on our read-aloud summer of “‘Girl’ Books I Didn’t Want My Boys to Miss.” We started with The Secret Garden, which really shouldn’t be considered a girls’ book because two of the three main characters are boys. It is a book, however, about feelings. Not only did my sons love it, but my husband didn’t want me to begin the reading until he was home. So I decided to see how far I could push this idea of mine. If you are setting up a girls’ book category, nothing fits better than A Little Princess. Well, all I can say is that my three male listeners were as enamored of it as they were of the others by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The fact is they were responding to the beautiful writing and not to the gender of the characters (in an all-girls school). Could I go still further? Yes, even my much-loved Fossil sisters in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (and then Theater Shoes) were a hit in my house—though it was not the ballet but the portrayal of theater in England to which my family was drawn.

As we began reading aloud Little House in the Big Woods, I found myself stunned that this was considered a girls’ book. Laura and Mary may be the heroines, but if you want to stick to stereotypes, has anyone noticed how much of this book is about the technical construction of homes and barns and icehouses or how many pages are devoted to guns and hunting and defending oneself? (What we noticed most about the book in the series about Almanzo’s childhood, Farmer Boy, was all the food!)

We also read Heidi and began seriously planning a family vacation in the Swiss Alps, which exceeded all our dreams when we were able to make it happen more than three years later. (My son ran through the fields of flowers, announcing he had made it to “Heidiland!”) In any case, this summer reading series continued a good deal past the summer and answered both my questions and my prayers.

Some might argue that the men in my family are in the minority and that the children in book groups are not a random sample, and that all may be true. But I have spent a lot of time considering the powerful negative impacts of generalizations. There is no need to reinforce the ideas of differences between the sexes. Those ideas are still widespread and deeply engrained in our culture. There are, however, serious reasons to protect those in the minority and serious dangers in encouraging people, particularly children, to believe that they belong to a somehow “deviant” group.

Our children—both boys and girls—lose when we constrain their reading preferences. Ironically, what is acceptable in books for girls today is a much wider range of characters and themes, thanks to the advances of feminism, while what is acceptable for boys is still sadly influenced by what I assume is homophobia and an intolerance of effeminacy. A girl reading Homer Price, Sherlock Holmes, or anything by Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain would be viewed as a reader of classics, but a boy reading much of Louisa May Alcott, the Brontës, or Jane Austen would have a harder time with his image. Girls, at the same time, are harmed by believing boys cannot be interested in female heroines and authors.

Of course, some boys may want to read books about boys and some girls, books about girls. I would hope, though, that we could let those choices be truly free. Let’s stop dividing into blue and pink pages. Let’s protect every person’s right to read what they love.

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Now they’re fashion-forward for summer 2012.

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One other thing–Kaling says she is driven crazy by the amount of time guys take to put their shoes on. But having recently spent a week with two female friends, I’ve been wondering why the ladies seem to take so long. Which is it?

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