“Sport wrote back: I have no Christmas spirit.

Harriet wrote back: We’ll have to fake it.”

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To hear Rhoda Henry’s daily chatter, her life passed in combat with an incompetent world and a malignant climate. It was only female talk, and not in the least uncommon. But talk, not sex, constitutes most of the intercourse between a man and his wife. Henry detested idle whining. More and more, silence was the response he had come to use. It dampened the noise.

I clicked the underlined portion in horror, and up popped a balloon which read

3 other people highlighted this portion of the book

Popular Highlights can be turned off and on by going to the Info menu in the bottom right corner of the Home screen.

While I’m GRATEFUL, of course, that this feature can be turned off, I still feel like a haberdashery offered me a choice in shorts, dirty or clean. Really, who needs to know that three bozos felt the need to complain about their wives via sticking a digital “how true!” in their Herman Wouk?  As the immortal Mrs. Harry Welsch magnificently snapped, “I don’t even know who you are.” And what do they mean, “other people?” I’m not touching that line or any other.

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I love this query; it’s requests like these that make us think about what books for kids do and don’t do. Off the top of my head I think of that Joan Bauer book about a girl with a passion for shoe-selling, Hope Was Here Rules of the Road, and several of Chris Crutcher’s early books feature teens with a passion for various sports. Oh, and that extremely high-minded but badly dated Madeleine L’Engle book about a fledgling actress, The Joys of Love. What else? Generalizing wildly, too often it seems that intense interest in something that isn’t another person is viewed in YA books as dysfunctional or simply as a way to i. d. a character; i.e. “Jane loves music,” but do we ever see her practice?

P.S. I put Harriet the Spy in the tags because she’s the most passionate person I know in children’s books, plus I’ve just started listening to Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, an adult mystery that begins, anyway, with a very Harriet-like third-grader.

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I’ve got an editorial in the upcoming Horn Book about the outing of Dumbledore, who in fact joins a long line of characters who coulda-woulda-shoulda be gay if the reader so inclines–like Shakespeare in Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows as we discussed here a few weeks ago. Or Harriet the Spy. (Or Sport, Beth Ellen, or Janie.) Betsy and Tacy! Frank and Joe! Nancy and George! Or not, too–the point is that characters become your imaginary friends whose lives, loves, and destinies can become what you need them to be.

I’m reminded of 1965, the momentous year when Barbie became flexible. Durable characters always are.

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As Monica Edinger pointed out in the post linked above, it’s not just kids. As Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote of her adolescence among the Greenwich Village Beats, “when I came of age in the 1950s, everyone one knew was an Outsider, and proud of it; and every Outsider belonged to a privileged Inner Circle of Outsiders, and then we grew up.” But not really: when, decades later, Harrison reviewed Beat poet Diane Di Prima’s memoir for the NYTBR, she devoted her entire review to proving that Di Prima hadn’t been one of the cool kids, really. It never ends. I’m not sure it can, heck, I’m not sure it should. As I once pointed out in a different context, this is how we got Protestants.

And today I read that kids are compiling hit lists of their enemies. Should we worry or be relieved that the Times chose to run this as a “Fashion & Styles” story?

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