by Roger Sutton
There is one more thing that hasn’t been said. Perhaps it is the only thing that can truthfully be said of all of these books, and it is the secret of their deathless charm.
They are all dreams. They are waking dreams. They make up to us for the sense of loss we feel when we wake up and find our dreams shrinking out of memory. A literary fantasy gives us a dream back to keep. Surely the reason why we are so inexhaustibly delighted by mice that talk and spells that work is that we want the laws and verities to be different from the ones by which we are trapped during the day. Like Dr. Seuss’s foolish king, we want something new to come out of the sky, not just this everlasting sunshine, rain, and snow, even if the new thing turns out to be sticky green Oobleck. And when the writer of a literary fantasy adds a real child to a surreal landscape, a flesh-and-blood Alice in a nonsensical Wonderland, we are given in one package both ends of our daily experience. It is a mixture of waking and dreaming, and that has a pungency that satisfies. It feeds a hunger we didn’t know we had.
MORE GREAT FANTASY
Franny Billingsley, Chime
358 pp. Grade 7 and up. Seventeen-year-old Briony can talk to the Old Ones; she’s convinced she’s a witch who has caused harm to others and deserves to be hanged. With the help of a young student newly arrived to Swampsea from London, Briony begins to reexamine her past. Steeped in the imagery of water and sky, this gorgeous fantasy melds ancient lore, false memories, real peril, and true love.
Kristin Cashore, Graceling
472 pp. Grade 7 and up. Lady Katsa was born with a hyper-developed talent for killing. With creepy villains, romance, and a butt-kicking but emotionally vulnerable heroine, this will appeal to fans of girl-power fantasy.
Neil Gaiman, illustrations by Dave McKean, The Graveyard Book
312 pp. Grades 6–8. After fortuitously escaping the murder of his family, a toddler is taken in by the ghostly denizens of a local graveyard. Occasional art enhances the otherworldly atmosphere. Both bittersweet and action-filled.
Grace Lin, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
282 pp. Grades 4–6. Minli, who lives in poverty at the foot of Fruitless Mountain, seeks the Old Man of the Moon, hoping to change her family’s fortunes. Interspersed retellings of Chinese folktales and luminous full-page illustrations, influenced by traditional Chinese art, contribute to this fantasy’s sense of timelessness.
Kierin Meehan, Hannah’s Winter
212 pp. Grades 4–6. Twelve-year-old Hannah stays with the Maekawa family in Japan while her mother travels. There Hannah discovers a ghost — a young boy who needs her help. Australian author Meehan shrouds her novel in a quietly creepy atmosphere that she lightens with unexpected humor. An agreeably accessible ghost story.
Terry Pratchett, Nation
370 pp. Grades 6–10. In an alternative nineteenth-century universe, a tsunami shipwrecks proper Ermintrude on a tropical island, where she meets Mau, sole survivor of his island Nation. Serious subjects and thought-provoking ethical questions are fully woven into action and character. It’s hard to imagine a reader who won’t feel welcomed into this Nation.
Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines
311 pp. Grades 6–10. In this first book in the Hungry City Chronicles, Reeve unveils a futuristic society of predatory wheeled “traction cities” that roam the post-Apocalyptic earth. The technological wizardry will gratify young fantasy and sci-fi lovers, while the intense emotions drive the plot at top speed. The series concludes in the exhilarating A Darkling Plain.
Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me
197 pp. Grades 4–6. Sixth-grader Miranda’s life is an ordinary round of family and school. But then she starts receiving anonymous notes that seem to foretell the future. The closely observed relationships among the characters make the mystery matter, and the closing revelations are both startling and satisfying.
Shaun Tan, The Arrival
128 pp. Grade 5 and up. Seeking a better life for his family, a man travels to a strange, unfamiliar country. It’s the triumph of this lavish, somber, wordless graphic novel that readers are kept in sympathetic step with the immigrant hero; we’re as out of place as he is.
Kate Thompson, The New Policeman
442 pp. Grades 5–9. Time is leaking out of the human world and into the timeless land of Tír na n’Óg of Irish legend, and fifteen-year-old fiddler J.J. determines to solve the mystery. Spellbinding for those who appreciate an original twist on authentic lore. Sequels: The Last of the High Kings; The White Horse Trick.
In many ways, authors of historical fiction and fantasy have similar tasks: each is involved in world building. For many youngsters, the Middle Ages is as foreign as Middle-earth. And you don’t have to go back that far, either: for example, the child narrator of X. J. Kennedy’s poem “Remembering Ice” thinking of his grandfather’s childhood as the time “when dinosaurs watched black-and-white TV.” From the Ottoman Empire to the Tet Offensive, children are most likely looking at blank screens of history, for they have no reference points for such places and events.
These kinds of gaps put a burden on authors, who have three responsibilities in writing historical fiction. First, they have to create a story that catches the attention of readers; second, they must interest these readers in a particular time period; and, third, they must ensure that the story suits the setting. These are the critical points to consider in evaluating historical fiction.
Story
Although we think of historical fiction as a separate genre, in reality multiple subgenres exist under its umbrella. In the books discussed below, for example, you’ll find historical mystery (A Drowned Maiden’s Hair); historical adventure (The Traitors’ Gate); and historical romance (How the Hangman Lost His Heart). If we want our kids to read historical fiction, the best approach is first to consider the types of books they already know and like, and then expand those tastes by recommending similar tales with a historical setting. Few children express preferences for any kind of story set in the past, but they are willing to venture backward in time within the constraints of already beloved genres.
Fine historical novels give readers great characters and great plots. Beginning with the first line of A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, Laura Amy Schlitz sets up one such character: “On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’” Schlitz makes a promise to readers: keep going, and you’ll meet someone interesting, quirky, and definitely worth knowing.
Strong adventure carries Louise Borden’s The Greatest Skating Race: A World War II Story from the Netherlands. Piet’s parents ask their ten-year-old son to usher two children from Holland to Belgium to escape an immediate threat of capture by the Germans. Piet, and his childhood friends Johanna and Joop, must skate over Holland’s frozen canals, braving dangers from both the weather and the German soldiers.
Time Period
The second consideration in historical fiction, that of creating an awareness of a time period, means that readers must first know that they’re reading about a different time. Obvious title clues can help if youngsters know anything about the period, but their meager knowledge about history limits such signals to a few well-known names and events. Many young readers of Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963, for example, are shocked at the ending (the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church); they are completely unaware of the horrific violence signaled by the city and date in the book’s title. So how do writers begin to create that awareness of another time and place?
In How the Hangman Lost His Heart, K. M. Grant sets her historical stage nicely. The jacket art, depicting a gallows, signals that this novel probably doesn’t take place in contemporary America. Equally important are visual clues about both subject and tone. The noose hangs in the shape of a heart, indicating a touch of romance, and the flowery script used for a few of the words suggests a light tone. The subtitle of chapter one establishes place and time: “London, August
10, 1746.” And Grant begins courting interest with the first sentence: “When Uncle Frank’s head was finally parted from his body, the crowd laughed.” Five pages into the book, readers will learn that during the middle of the eighteenth century in London, public executions were a grisly form of entertainment (“Alice had not been able to watch . . . but the sighs and appalled groans of the crowd gave an up-to-the-minute commentary as her beloved uncle was first strung up, then cut down before he was dead, sliced open like a halibut or perhaps a herring, and had his innards removed”). In addition, readers learn that such spectacles were common (“Just a small one today, with only the colonel and one or two others to do”) and that the heads of the executed were severed and put on public display. Adroitly Grant hooks her audience by juxtaposing the earthy unpleasantness of the period with a touch of humor. Readers will either continue the tale or move to another, but they will know what they are in for.
Setting
Once a child’s interest is piqued, writers face their third responsibility: to continue their narratives while remaining true to the chosen period. One way to capture the spirit of the times is through language. Modern writers typically employ language patterns much leaner than those of a century ago, but by adopting and adapting Dickensian cadences in The Traitors’ Gate, a novel set in the mid-nineteenth century in which a young boy attempts to unravel the mystery of his father’s imprisonment, author Avi helps create a world far removed from this one. “Then too there was a sluggishly moving chaos of wagons, barouches, carts, omnibuses, barrows, hackneys, phaetons, and Hansoms, pulled by London’s hundred thousand horses. No wonder the cobblestones fairly sank beneath a sea of dung. No wonder that every breathing thing, every rolling thing, every voice, every cry, call, laugh, and sob, every shoe, boot, and huff made so much din as to produce a relentless rumble that drummed and thrummed into every living London ear — and dead ones too, no doubt.” At first these sentence constructions may put a burden on young readers, but the end result is, to borrow a metaphor from Robert Hughes, that they’ve visited a city with as many twists and turns as the language, a much more authentic experience than visiting the same historical spot with language as straight and direct as the streets of a planned modern suburb.
Individual words matter as much as patterns. A fictional account of Abigail Adams writing to John to “remember the ladies” would ring false if a member of her sewing circle were to prod her with the contemporary “You go, girl.”
Authors employ language not only as a way to locate their stories in time and place but also to shape a character’s actions, reactions, and responsibilities to reflect the time period. Nathaniel Benchley’s Sam the Minuteman, a book for beginning readers, introduces young Sam, a boy growing up in 1770s Massachusetts. At the beginning of the Battle of Lexington, Sam’s father instructs him: “Get your gun, Sam . . . The British have left Boston and are coming this way.” Benchley adds, “So Sam got his gun and followed his father through the darkness to the village green.” Although far removed from modern circumstances, ten-year-old Sam’s gun ownership is accepted in this setting because Benchley places it in historical context.
But such historical honesty comes with a price. What if kids read books about boys carrying guns or girls sewing samplers? What kind of role models do these stories provide today’s children? The most vocal pleas I hear related to historical fiction concern girls, who were assigned largely passive roles in times past. No matter what our dreams for young girls may be today, the historical novelist can’t just plop an “empowered” twenty-first-century girl into a nineteenth-century setting willy-nilly, without carefully laying out the reasons why this particular character is rebelling against type. Otherwise, there’s little possibility of today’s readers understanding why the roles of women were once different and why women fought so hard to become who they are today.
That said, historical fiction almost always features characters we are meant to like sooner or later, and these kinds of heroes and heroines create their own historical inaccuracies. Many real-world children owned slaves, aspired to be Nazis, expected women to be second-class citizens, or hated Indians. They are a part of our history but seldom surface as characters in novels of their times — a caution about the limits of historical fiction.
What I hear as the counterargument to the presence of contemporary youngsters in historical fiction is that we have to “hook” modern readers, to give them stories that start with what they know: their own lives. I would agree, but the universal concerns of humankind appear from the first century to the present one. Good historical fiction incorporates universal themes without sacrificing historical verisimilitude.
In Marthe Jocelyn’s How It Happened in Peach Hill, set immediately after the First World War, Annie Grey and her mama, Madame Caterina, Spiritual Advisor, perfect the art of the con. Annie’s role is to slip into the background to gather gossip that Madame Caterina embellishes in her spiritual readings. As Annie begins to develop her own value system, she begins pulling away from her mother. This kind of conflict between parent and teenager, which is as old as the family unit, certainly provides a contemporary hook for young readers; it’s repeated every day in households across the country.
In My Brother Sam Is Dead, authors Christopher and James Lincoln Collier use the same conflict between parent and child to alert readers to two widely different viewpoints on the Revolutionary War. Sam and his father argue their respective political views, with Sam electing to serve in the colonial army and his father opposing him: “I will not have subversion, I will not have treason in my house. We are Englishmen, we are subjects of the King.” And Sam retorts, “I am not an Englishman, I am an American, and I am going to fight to keep my country free. . . . It’s the principle.” Change a few words, and this argument could have occurred during the Civil War, both World Wars, the Vietnam conflict, or the war in Iraq. That kind of situation allows young readers an authentic entry into history. The discussion between Sam and his father also alerts readers to the historical setting in a perfectly natural way. Often authors of historical fiction instead fill in that background with awkward asides or artificially interpolated conversations that signal a small history lesson.
No matter how historically accurate a novel may be, it provides but a small glimpse into the panorama of any event. Readers cannot learn all about the Revolutionary War by reading Johnny Tremain; they can only see how one apprentice might have reacted to the events going on around him. Not only would Johnny Tremain’s views be different from those, say, of a privileged son of a colonial governor or a young slave in Virginia, but in re-creating dialogue and situations to tell her own unique story, Johnny Tremain’s author was writing fiction, not history.
I began this discussion with the ways in which historical fiction and fantasy are alike. Let me close with one major difference: children tend to prefer fantasy over historical fiction. Why? Because when children read fantasy, we don’t quiz them on the setting, we don’t ask them to remember particular details, we don’t ask them to take away isolated facts to help them in school assignments. In other words, reading fantasy asks little more than immersion in a book and reading for the fun of it. Let those same principles guide us as we encourage the reading of historical fiction.
I expect we can all agree that historical fiction should be good fiction and good history. If we leap over the first briar patch by calling good fiction an “interesting narrative with well-developed characters,” we are still left with the question of what is good history. Alas, there are thorns here, too. The German historian Leopold von Ranke said that writing history was saying “what really happened” — but according to whom? Writers of history select, describe, and explain historical evidence — and thereby interpret. Not only will the loser’s version of the war never match the winner’s, but historical interpretations of what happened, and why, are subject to endless revision over time. A transforming event of the past — say, the American Revolution — can be understood
as a social, economic, or intellectual movement; as avoidable or inevitable; as a tragedy of misunderstanding or a triumph of liberty.
Historical revisionism makes its way into historical fiction, of course, including that written for children, usually in response to changing social climates. Esther Forbes wrote Johnny Tremain, her famous novel of the American Revolution, in the early 1940s, when the United States had recently entered the maelstrom of World War II. Forbes’s story took the traditional view that the Revolution was a struggle for political freedom, fought, as one of her characters said, so that “a man can stand up.” The parallel Forbes saw with a contemporary war against political tyranny was implied but clear. A generation later, the Colliers’ My Brother Sam Is Dead and Robert Newton Peck’s Hang for Treason saw the same history through a different lens. Writing in a time of passionate division over a modern war, these authors looked back to the American Revolution and saw not idealism but the coercion, hypocrisy, cruelty, and betrayal that are part of any war, in any country. In the Colliers’ story, the success of the Revolution had to be weighed against the suffering it inflicted: “I keep thinking that there might have been another way, beside war, to achieve the same end.” Peck looked behind the heroic legend of Ethan Allen and his band of Green Mountain Boys and found more greed for land than hunger for liberty, and renegade tactics as barbarous as any tyrant’s. In Peck’s telling, Allen’s brand of irregular warfare was terrorism, not a noble struggle for liberty.
