Illustration: Jose-Luis Olivares

“Hi, Mum! Hi, Pop!” Mike squeaks as he hops from the screen onto the table. “Look at me! I’m the first boy sent by television!”

Mrs. Teavee shrieks. “You’re an inch tall! Oh, my sweet boy!”

“Sweet?” Grandpa Joe whispers to me. “He blew Violet to bits!”

True, Mike did chuck his flinty Everlasting Gobstopper at the ballooning, purple Violet, popping her and splattering blueberry juice, sugary blood, and bile all over the Inventing Room. But Violet was hardly a sweetie. She was, after all, the one who had shoved Veruca into a mob of vicious, mutant squirrels and happily snapped her gum as the gnawed Princess of Nuts slid down the garbage chute. Of course, Veruca herself had previously kicked Augustus squarely in his generous lederhosen, dumping him into the churning chocolate river that led to his being swirled into fudge. (I regret ever having eaten a morsel manufactured in this place.)

Yet I find it difficult to condemn my fellow contestants for their assorted cruelties. Our sadistic host, who at present is suppressing snickers as he unapologetically consoles Mrs. Teavee, lured us all like Hansels and Gretels into this gingerbread house of horrors. If anyone here lacks sweetness, it is Mr. Willy Wonka, demon chocolatier. When this bloody contest concludes and I claim my prize, I will personally see to it that he receives his just desserts.

We were five ticket-holders this morning; now the remaining lone obstacle separating me from my prize has been greatly, er, reduced—to the size of a gummy bear, in fact. The humane thing would be to put wee Mike out of his misery. At least this is how I rationalize the heinous crime I am about to commit.

I reach into my tattered pocket and silently commend myself for having scooped up some of the treats I found behind the door marked EXPLODING CANDY FOR YOUR ENEMIES. I select a weapon disguised as a tiny yellow butter mint. It ought to be sufficient to take out a target so small.

“Go on, Charlie, finish the job,” Grandpa Joe says, nudging me with his bony elbow. “Then it’s one last moralistic Oompa-Loompa song and we’ve won.”

I nod, bracing myself for the blast, and lob the mint.

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We March

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To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement [New York Times Books]

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The Cabinet of Earths

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And Then It’s Spring

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The One and Only Ivan

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10 Hungry Rabbits: Counting & Color Concepts

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The children’s publishing industry is slowly catching up to the trend. Although many “flavor of the month” pop music biographies are published every year (such as Scholastic’s Star Scene series), the number of informative and beautifully illustrated rock-and-roll books for children is still limited. Nevertheless there are a variety of indispensable books, both fiction and nonfiction, for preschoolers to fifth graders that explore rock’s history and its famous legends, celebrating the timeless—and ageless—joy of rock-and-roll rebellion.

Kathleen Krull and illustrator Stephen Alcorn create one of the most comprehensive collections of rock legends for young readers in The Book of Rock Stars: 24 Musical Icons That Shine Through History. Beginning with Elvis and ending with Kurt Cobain, one-page biographies (the Beatles get two and a half pages) chronologically trace the history of rock through the story arcs of its famous innovators. Krull explores the visionary work of each artist, highlighting his or her personal story and musical influences. Acknowledging in her introduction that “not all parents will love this book” because of some of the performers’ less dignified moments, she shines light on the dark matter without judgment in an honest, age-appropriate way for third grade and up. Alcorn’s busy polychrome relief-block prints give each personality a reverential air, freezing the gods and goddesses of rock in swirling psychedelic colors, while adorning them with Greek and religious imagery. The book includes a well-considered bibliography and three or four of each artist’s groundbreaking albums. Any young rock star will pore over these pages in awe.

Not far behind is Holly George-Warren’s Shake, Rattle & Roll: The Founders of Rock & Roll, an entertaining primer that spotlights rock’s original heavyweights. In concise one-page summaries, George-Warren provides vital statistics, presents an overview of the artists’ upbringing and musical influences, and lists the artists’ hit songs. The nearly incalculable debt owed to African Americans and women is acknowledged in this book, with Fats Domino, LaVern Baker, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Wanda Jackson, and James Brown rightfully included. More obvious choices such as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and Jerry Lee Lewis are on the bill as well. Laura Levine’s mixed-media folk-art-like illustrations offer a joyful brightness that mirrors their subjects, with song lyrics and other details peppered throughout the framed pieces.

Individual rock legends have found their way into children’s books, too. In Forever Young, illustrator Paul Rogers uses the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s 1974 song of the same title to compose a sweet homage to a living legend. Rogers re-creates 1950s and 1960s New York City with muted colors and sharp lines, giving it an earthy, retro vibe. Against the backdrops of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, two folk music flashpoints at the time, the story follows a young Dylan: obsessed with luminaries such as James Dean and Odetta, influenced by rural folk and blues music and the era’s cultural and political upheavals, the singer-songwriter begins playing his songs around New York and eventually travels to Washington, D.C., to join in protests and peace rallies.

The illustrator’s intricate knowledge of the time period and his subject is impressive, as the who’s-who of important figures that helped shape Dylan’s creative universe populate the pages. Jack Kerouac, Joan Baez, and many more make cameos. Even the books on the young Dylan’s shelf match a Dylan lyric, with Ezra Pound sitting alongside T. S. Eliot (“And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower” from the song “Desolation Row”). Such details make this book a standout addition to the mountain of critical and biographical literature on Bob Dylan.

Whenever he’s asked to name his favorite guitar player of all time, Paul McCartney doesn’t hesitate: it’s Jimi Hendrix. The formative years of the legendary guitarist are explored in Gary Golio’s Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow: A Story of the Young Jimi Hendrix. A Coretta Scott King Award Honor book, it tells the story of a young Hendrix in a colorful and poetic way, portraying him as a fiery kid who had rock-and-roll dreams much earlier than casual fans might realize. Using the “colors of sound” rainbow theme throughout, the book crackles like an old Tweed amplifier with Hendrix discovering rural blues music, Elvis Presley, and Howlin’ Wolf while growing up in 1950s Seattle. Golio describes Hendrix’s guitar playing so vividly that readers are sure to be left craving the albums to round out the experience (proof positive: I’ve had Axis: Bold as Love on repeat for the last few weeks).

Javaka Steptoe’s colorful mixed-media plywood art explodes off the page. His earthy, psychedelic folk art matches Golio’s poetic treatment of his subject beautifully, capturing Hendrix’s sound with arresting visuals. Steptoe includes a fascinating illustrator’s note, detailing his exhaustive research into Hendrix’s life and music. The book could have multiple uses in the classroom, from music appreciation to an art unit on colors and/or collage. For fun, gift this book with the CD reissue of Are You Experienced? and you’ll be the coolest relative of any young guitarist.

Although you might not believe Elvis was recently seen washing his car in Toledo, the King lives on in Shake, Rattle & Turn That Noise Down!: How Elvis Shook Up Music, Me and Mom. Cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty’s touching mini graphic novel memoir details when, as an eight-year-old in 1955, he was introduced to rock-and-roll and the music of Elvis Presley through a tiny transistor radio. The new, rocking sound of Elvis sends Stamaty’s mother into a tizzy of confusion and fear, setting up a classic “us vs. them” scenario, with mom criticizing what she can’t understand (to paraphrase Bob Dylan, another Elvis disciple) and Stamaty desperately trying to explain why he’s all shook up. In the end, Elvis and his young fan win Mom over. The sweetness of this mother-son relationship shimmers throughout the story (the book is dedicated to her). Within his own personal history, Stamaty highlights the diverse list of musical performers who all owe a debt to the King. His vivid illustrations burst within the panels.

Very young children have some rocking selections, too. In The ABCs of Rock, Melissa Duke Mooney and the DIY screen print company Print Mafia have created, quite possibly, the most punk ABC board book ever. “A” could be for apple, but to Mooney it’s for the band AC/DC. “C” is for the Clash, and so on. The art is gritty and crusty, like a crude photocopied show flyer disintegrating on a telephone pole. Each letter includes a few visual details about the artist it represents, such as Elvis Costello’s signature black-rimmed glasses. If you’re looking for a quirky read-aloud or the perfect baby shower book for punk rock parents, this is it.

In the fiction picture book world, Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s Punk Farm and the sequel Punk Farm on Tour provide a double shot of rock-and-roll read-aloud craziness. Animals on a Wisconsin farm start a punk rock band (unbeknownst to Farmer Joe). They practice regularly and perform live for adoring crowds. The band looks sharp, dressed in a mash-up of signature styles, such as Born in the U.S.A. bandannas, punk rock chains (with cowbells instead of padlocks), and striped ties straight out of the new wave eighties. Topping it off, each animal hides behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

Preparing for their hometown gig, the band practices their punked-up version of “Old MacDonald” while the crowd lines up outside to buy tickets. When the band takes the stage, the crowd goes nuts. Subsequent pages show each animal with their respective instrument. Krosoczka masterfully uses onomatopoeia to bring each instrument’s sound to life. Close-ups of the guitars, drums, and keyboards could be used in a music unit to point out what makes an instrument work: guitar-tuning machines, strings, bridges, keyboards, drums and cymbals are clearly defined in the pictures.

In the sequel Punk Farm on Tour, Farmer Joe leaves town to attend a tractor conference in Reno, and Punk Farm takes their show on the road. After polishing up their “killer song” (“The Wheels on the Van”) and piling into their tricked-out dilapidated van, the band crisscrosses the nation. The live performances blast off the page. Krosoczka is clearly having fun here, tossing out rock-and-roll clichés of innocent debauchery, such as Pig stumbling out of the barn with lipstick all over his face.

Punk Farm and Punk Farm on Tour truly capture the rock experience in all its ragged glory, from band-mate camaraderie and songwriting to live performance and audience participation. It’s all here, splashed out in thick acrylics. If you’re a guitar-playing teacher or librarian, trade the lazy jangle of “Old MacDonald” and “Wheels…” for grungy power chords and within a minute you’ll have your audience on their feet and rocking out.

If rock music has taught us anything, it’s that wisdom can come from unexpected messengers. Indeed, the most self-destructive malcontent in popular music, Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, had simple advice for the next generation: “You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you’ve got music.”

There’s a children’s book in there somewhere.

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Little Dog Lost: The True Story of a 
Brave Dog Named Baltic

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Ladies and gentlemen, winners of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, people of the book…

We gather to ask our annual question: “Can there still be books for the young?” Even now, in these darkening days, while Barnes & Noble eats independent booksellers, and Amazon eats Barnes & Noble. New problems to mask the old ones we never solved, since you can still sit out twelve years of school in the “remedial” program not because you’re “learning disabled” but because you aren’t home at night. Can our books still tell their stories in the age of the “digitally reduced attention span”? Can we still reach a generation whose own parents lost eye contact with them long ago? In the full knowledge that there is no app for eye contact…

Oh, yes. The answer is yes because never have the young needed us more. Never has a young generation on their way to adulthood lived this far from adults. Never has a generation needed an adult voice more, if only on the page and well disguised.

I am with you today—with my forthcoming book throbbing in my hand—from the great colloquium and continuum of writers, living and dead. We march in a proud tradition. I am with you this morning because a high-school girl twenty years my junior and 1,500 miles away once wrote a book called The Outsiders. And while New York publishers didn’t know where Tulsa was, they were alert to a vast and overlooked readership soon to be called YAs, “young adults.” Though they weren’t YAs at all. They were PLs—the pubescent literate, a despised minority even then.

I’m with you because a New Jersey housewife wrote a book called Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, bringing down upon her head the wrath of mothers for the signal reason that she was making contact with their daughters just as they were losing it.

And I’m certainly with you this morning because in my early years as a writer, the most important American novel of the second half of the twentieth century broke over all our heads. It was Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, a novel that after thirty-eight years is as new as the dystopic titles on this year’s lists—because of its stunning portrayal of the peer group leader the young always set up over themselves when adult authority fails them. That book was never newer than now, when the peer group leaders can monitor electronically around the clock their followers and enemies.

Though I could never be Robert Cormier, I knew on the day I finished reading The Chocolate War that writing for the young was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And so I did. I have been a writer for forty years—and forty books. In fact, I’ve been a writer for forty years, three months, and six days—after seventh period. I was a teacher who was going to have to leave the classroom in order to communicate with the young. I’d have been a teacher unto the end had I been allowed to teach as I’d been taught, but when teachers are more tired at the end of the school day than the students, the wrong people are being educated.

I was an English teacher, of course. What else is there? Because if you cannot use language, it will be used against you. And because I believe in the moral superiority of the semi-colon.

On a June day in the midst of life, I quit my teaching job. I turned in my tenure and my attendance book—which was my first work of fiction—and went home to write or die. And now I stand before you forty years later with my fortieth book in my hand, still working the New England territory, like the third act of Death of a Salesman. The book is called Secrets at Sea. It is my first anthropomorphic novel. I have labored forty years and brought forth a mouse.

Throughout those forty years, there have always been two items on my desk: a manuscript struggling to be born and a book by somebody else. Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer. We write in admiration of better writers than we are. As William Ralph Inge once said, “Originality is undetected plagiarism.” The book on my desk these days is Stuart Little by E. B. White.

It is Stuart Little because I’m looking for a sequel to Secrets at Sea—another story in the voice of a mouse, a rodent viewpoint. Viewpoint is everything: the one voice our stories never need is ours. And so I need all the help I can get, from a writer who’s walked that way himself and got a book out of it still selling briskly sixty-six years later. I can’t tell you exactly what I’m getting out of Stuart Little. Certainly not tips for plot—Stuart Little is episodic in a way my editor would discourage. And the conclusion is inconclusive. And I’m not picking up hints for dealing with the implausibility of an anthropomorphic character. Not from a story in which a mouse is born into a human family and only days later is wearing a hat and carrying a cane and speaking like E. B. White.

No, I’m not getting pointers from Stuart Little—I’m getting companionship from E. B. White, dead these many years. That’s an advantage of our field: we can talk to dead people. And we need to because writing is the loneliest job in the world. Writing is sitting in an empty room trying to make a blank page speak in voices that are not ours. We need to because being a writer is remembering your roots and the rich history of writing for the young.

Speaking of history—Stuart Little was published in 1945, antique times indeed. A world of 10 cent rides up 5th Avenue on double-decker buses. A world when the school day began with a pledge of allegiance to the flag. In 1945, the president of the United States—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—died in the arms of his mistress, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the entire American press corps thought that the reading—and voting—public would be better off not knowing that. The president was a helpless cripple, too, and we weren’t to know that, either. Not quite “freedom of information” in the current climate of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange; of self-inflicted crotch shots. Or are there still things they aren’t telling us?

In 1945 Stuart Little’s publication set off a ripple of its own. In fact, E. B. White was in trouble from the first line. Here is that famous beginning:

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way. He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse.

You might think the entire literacy establishment would fall back in admiration of opening lines of this magisterial simplicity, this invitational rhythm. But no. There was concern among some librarians about a woman giving birth to a mouse. Something a little gynecologically unnerving; something a little ob-gyn dodgy. It was 1945. Hitler’s death camps were opened, and the Russians raped Berlin. It was the year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the end of the most destructive war in human history, with fifty million dead. But there was some concern in certain circles over Stuart Little. And the book might fare no better today. Let us read on:

Mr. and Mrs. Little named him Stuart, and Mr. Little made him a tiny bed out of four clothespins and a cigarette box.

A cigarette box? The entire world of children’s books is now a strictly smoke-free zone, though the nearest schoolyard to my house isn’t. And there’s more trouble on page 122, in that conversation between Stuart and a girl named Harriet Ames:

Harriet was for fixing the canoe up and going out on the river anyway, but Stuart couldn’t stand that idea.

“It’s no use,” he said bitterly, “it wouldn’t be the same.”

“The same as what?” asked Harriet.

“The same as the way it was going to be, when I was thinking about it yesterday. I’m afraid a woman can’t understand these things.”

Oh dear.

But then Margaret Mitchell couldn’t get Gone with the Wind published today. And we don’t live in times of greater intellectual freedom than in 1945. Twenty-five years ago a parent personally removed a book of mine from a high school library. The book was my best, a book called Remembering the Good Times, written to dramatize the classic signs of adolescent suicide. And that parent feared that if her son found out about suicide, he might want to try it.

Two years ago a book of mine called A Season of Gifts, starring my most popular character, Grandma Dowdel, endured an internet attack because in it an old lady pretends that her pumpkin patch is haunted by the ghost of a Kickapoo Indian princess.

No book, no word, is safe, and we are battered by left and right. When the attack comes from the family values right, it provokes outrage. And when the attack issues from the multicultural left, it inspires fear. But then we who write for the young are held to a higher standard, and always were, and regularly by people who never read a word we ever wrote.

And so, why has Stuart Little, this badly dated, politically incorrect book, turned out to be timeless? It’s not for its diction. E. B. White could give a newborn mouse an adult vocabulary because the children of 1945 could hear adult voices. They—we—were getting our language and our rules from adults—the overlapping parent and teacher; the grandparents monitoring the street from the front porch; even the cop on the beat. And now the young who text from the dinner table and sleep with their phones receive their language and their orders from their peer group leaders, people with no more vocabulary than themselves. Ya know? It’s like…they only hear each other.

And so why does Stuart Little live, on and off my desk? He lives because he’s the smallest, youngest, most vulnerable, easily overlooked character in the story, and its hero. He’s the intended reader with pointed ears and a tail tacked on. He’s an engraved invitation to the reader to step into the page and star in the show. And apart from his preposterously articulate voice, he’s not E. B. White. Because a story had better never be the autobiography of the author. A story had far better be the biography of the person the reader would like to be.

Writing is the most uncentering of experiences, and we really have nothing to say until we get ourselves off the page, off the stage, and let our readers become our characters, try them on for size. And so here is the sacred secret of what we do—and we need to share this with the creative writing teacher: a story is always about something that never happened to the author. E. B. White was never a mouse, or a spider. And Beatrix Potter was never a rabbit. J. K. Rowling did not attend Hogwarts. And Gary Paulsen was never dropped down in the wilderness with nothing in his hand but a hatchet. Stephenie Meyer was never bitten by a you-know-what. We write from observation, not experience. From research, not recollection. All fiction is based on research. We don’t write what we know. We write what we can find out. Every book begins in the library in the hope that it will end there.

We create characters who never were, for a readership of people we never were: people born in the twenty-first century whose school days begin not with a pledge of allegiance to the flag but with the message texted from one row of the classroom to another. Allegiance to quite another power.

And what have we—we people in this room—to offer the young their peer group leaders cannot?

Ah. Roots.

Because all books are history books before the ink is dry and the pub date due. And our books may be the only history our readers ever learn, in school and college to come. Because they’re not learning sequential history and how it repeats, and how to recognize the past when it comes round again: the purpose of education. A poll of high school seniors conducted this past year asked them what country we fought in the American Revolution. As many seniors said Spain as said England, and France came a close third. It’s worse than that, as we know, for the permissively reared majority who believe that history began with their births and geography is wherever they are.

And so they need us—and every story we can think of to tell them about how history repeats, in every human heart. Stories set against geographies that invite them into wider worlds—because we never, ever, write about anybody who can move home. Our stories must end with more hope than that.

It’s said that through their literature, the English invented childhood. And so perhaps that’s where our history began…back in the century when booksellers were the publishers. And a bookseller named John Newbery who kept his shop hard by the walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral published Goody Two-Shoes and a Mother Goose collection. And so we began to be—down a lazy river with two boys on a raft, the river and the raft upon which American literature began. We march in a tradition that has survived much. We’ve survived Louisa May Alcott’s tireless attempts to ban Huck Finn. And we’ve survived Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy—that Freudian nightmare in a velvet suit cut from his mother’s skirts (that hurts). And now we’re up against the commercialized cynicism of “SparkNotes,” while in the near distance the text and the tweet bomb the ruins of our language.

But just think of all the places we’ve gone in our unfurling tradition. All the places we’ve taken our young, down all the years and the twists and turns of the yellow brick road. Through The Phantom Tollbooth to The House at Pooh Corner and over the Bridge to Terabithia into Tom’s Midnight Garden. All the engaging worlds—real and imagined. All those places where the wild things are. All those swiftly tilting planets within the covers of books. All the places we’ve been…and all the places we have yet to go. All in order to tell the young the truth—a truth they will hear from no one but us: that if you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

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