A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  I label the last category of adventure story “picaresque.” Britannica defines the term as “relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer . . . as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive.” One key difference between the classic eighteenth-century picaresque novel and the contemporary children’s picaresque is that rarely is the protagonist a rogue, though often he or she is lowborn. Almost always the protagonist is at a huge disadvantage in life because of age, size, lack of means, or some other issue.

  While hardly lowborn, the young Charles Darwin was largely directionless when he convinced his father to let him try his hand at being a naturalist. Ruth Ashby’s nonfiction account, Young Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle, charts his experiences as a world explorer, during which he encountered any number of indigenous peoples and customs and survived both a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. The backstory to the scientist’s world-changing thought makes for great adventure reading.

  Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy, on the other hand, is classic picaresque, rogue and all: Bud Caldwell, in making his way across Depression-ravaged Michigan, encounters such disparate social types as librarians, the homeless, a Pullman porter, jazz musicians, and the occasional white person. His frequently adduced “Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself” contains the kind of survival tips that kids need to know: “If You Got to Tell a Lie, Make Sure It’s Simple and Easy to Remember” (#3).

  At first glance, there seems to be little in common between a book like Bud, Not Buddy and Basher Five-Two. The former is an at times sidesplitting tale of an orphan questing for a home; the latter, the gritty true story of a soldier doing his job. Both, however, provide child readers with a brush with peril, with a model of competence under adversity, and with strategies to triumph over that adversity. Bud Caldwell lies; Scott O’Grady eats bugs. For child readers, avid and reluctant alike, the chance to identify with a protagonist who risks and succeeds is an emotional necessity, and adventure books — of whatever stripe — can provide it.

  When I was a child, I loved animal stories. It seemed back then that the dog or the cat or the horse started out as words on a page but quickly became flesh and blood and moved directly into my heart. At some point the words were dissolved by my tears, and I would make out the rest of the passage by blotting my tears on my sleeve.

  One of the great animal stories of all time is The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford. The book was first published in 1961, but nothing about it seems dated. The land the animals travel over, beautifully described, is a part of Canada that probably has not changed. Neither have the emotions the story evokes.

  Three animals — Bodger, an old English bull terrier; Luath, a Labrador retriever; and Tao, a Siamese cat — undertake a two-hundred-mile journey to reach their family. None of the animals could have survived the journey alone, but by mutual caring and help, they succeed.

  I reread the book this summer, and near the end, the Hunter family stands at the edge of the woods. They think the dogs and cat are lost and they’ll never see them again. Then young Elizabeth hears something. Her father, not daring to believe, gives a whistle. A joyous answering bark rings through the hills, and Luath and Tao come into the clearing. By the time old Bodger makes his appearance, his ragged banner of a tail streaming out behind him, I am once again blotting my tears on my sleeve.

  MORE GREAT ADVENTURE BOOKS

  Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker

  326 pp. Grade 7 and up. In a dystopian future America, Nailer lives on the drowned coast of New Orleans, eking out a desperate living as a lowly “ship breaker” stripping wrecked tankers for salvage. When he comes upon a shipwrecked girl, Nailer risks all to help her. The novel is both a vivid depiction of a bleak society and an edge-of-your-seat thriller.

  Frank Cottrell Boyce, Cosmic

  313 pp. Grades 4–6. Twelve-year-old Liam, tall for his age, is often mistaken for an adult, a fact that he uses to his advantage when he finds himself among a group of children sent on a secret space mission. When things go wrong, the kids’ quick thinking averts a disaster. Likable characters, lots of humor, and the far-fetched situation make this a page-turner.

  Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

  374 pp. Grades 6–8. Katniss volunteers to represent her district in the Hunger Games, a compulsory, government-sponsored reality-TV show from which only one of twenty-four teenage contestants will emerge alive. The twists and turns are addictive in this compulsively readable blend of science fiction, romance, and social commentary. Sequels: Catching Fire; Mockingjay.

  Siobhan Dowd, The London Eye Mystery

  323 pp. Grades 4–7. When twelve-year-old narrator Ted’s cousin disappears, he and his sister join forces to solve the conundrum. Ted has Asperger’s syndrome, and his hardwired honesty and never-ending struggle to make sense of the world make him an especially sympathetic character. The mystery itself includes well-embedded clues readers can follow.

  Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember

  275 pp. Grades 4–6. The city of Ember has no natural light, and the blackouts of its antiquated electrical grid are coming more and more frequently. Doon, a curious twelve-year-old, and his spirited schoolmate, Lina, determine to save the city. The writing is spare and suspenseful; fans will savor the entire series, which culminates in The Diamond of Darkhold.

  Kenneth Oppel, Airborn

  355 pp. Grades 6–8. Matt Cruse, a cabin boy on the airship Aurora, helps rescue hot-air balloonist Benjamin Molloy. Set in an alternate Edwardian-styled past and featuring an enthusiastic narrator, this is a fast-paced adventure. Sequels: Skybreaker; Starclimber.

  Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

  375 pp. Grades 6–10. Percy Jackson, living with ADHD, finds meaning behind his difficulties at last — he’s really a half-blood offspring of Poseidon. The book is packed with allusions to Greek mythology as well as rip-snorting action sequences. The first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, which closes with The Last Olympian.

  Trenton Lee Stewart, illustrations by Carson Ellis, The Mysterious Benedict Society

  487 pp. Grades 3–6. Orphan Reynie Muldoon becomes a member of a crack team tasked to infiltrate the evil-intentioned Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened. With its lively style, fresh character portrayals, and well-timed revelations, this story flies along. Sequels: The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey; The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

  Scott Westerfeld, illustrations by Keith Thompson, Leviathan

  438 pp. Grades 6–10. As World War I breaks out, Prince Aleksandar escapes the enemies of his father, the assassinated archduke; meanwhile, Deryn Sharp, disguised as a boy, is aboard the British airbeast Leviathan. The excitement escalates when the two sides meet — the German Clankers with their traditional machinery and the English Darwinists with their biotechnology — in this mix of alternative history and sci-fi steampunk.

  Everybody reads more nonfiction than they notice, but it has been the perennial stepchild of children’s literature, with the lion’s share of prizes and attention going to novels and picture storybooks. In her 2008 Newbery acceptance speech for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Laura Amy Schlitz confessed that “like most librarians, I secretly favor fiction over nonfiction. Facts are necessary, facts are useful, facts are fascinating. But stories enrich our lives.” Yet the powers of storytelling are readily found among writers of nonfiction — a constant theme in the essays that follow; at the same time, they insist that storytelling is just one of many ways to effectively convey information and an author’s passion for his or her subject. Marc Aronson, himself an author of social and political histories for young people, writes here about how to rescue readers from both the tyranny of fiction and the paint-by-numbers approach of so much nonfiction published for children.

  On the topic of biography, Betty Carter writes that “for many children, bio
graphies may well be their first introduction to point of view,” and her essay on this staple of the school report demonstrates the far richer possibilities for how biographies can speak to young readers.

  Back in the early 1960s, when Isaac Asimov was a columnist for The Horn Book, he gave us a salutary reminder of the value of scientific thinking: “We want the bright youngster to be interested in the world about him, and I have no patience with those who think of ‘nature’ as a saccharine subject consisting chiefly of daisies and bobolinks.” Our present science specialist, Danielle Ford, is associate professor in the school of education at the University of Delaware and brings a similar briskness to considering what to look for in a science book for young people.

  And poetry. Poetry! (Yes, thanks to a quirk in the Dewey decimal system, poetry is classified as nonfiction in your local library.) Through over-teaching and ill-advised homework (“write a haiku about your grandfather”), kids learn to loathe it. Two poets offer some wisdom: Alice Schertle advises us on the intrinsic rewards of close attention to “concentrated language,” while Naomi Shihab Nye recommends we use it to make life saner.

  Nonfiction for middle-grade and teen readers requires parents to adjust their expectations, as if they were in a foreign country and getting used to the language and customs. You may well have trouble finding the equivalent of the nonfiction books you enjoy or recall having loved as a child. In compensation, you will find it easy to select books that are carefully designed and illustrated, that have lots of engaging information, or that enter into some aspect of history in a very personal voice.

  Here’s my guess about why nonfiction for younger readers is so different from books for adults. From the expansion of national literacy in the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, middle-class Americans shared an assumed nonfiction knowledge base. The great nineteenth-century magazines like The Century, Scribner’s, and Harper’s were published for those readers. Then, in the twentieth century, adults bought books for their homes to display that learning.

  Even if no one in the family actually ever read Winston Churchill’s four books on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, or the eleven volumes in which Will and Ariel Durant recounted The Story of Civilization, you nonetheless owned them. (Fortunately, the Durants’ books came in red-and-white dust jackets, so they stood out on your shelves, where they announced your familiarity with the great ideas and heroes of the past.) Life and Look, Time and Newsweek, the three TV networks — all assumed a standard base of, say, eighth-grade-level knowledge of history and science.

  The attitude in schools, libraries, and children’s publishing was that young readers would be eager to catch up, to learn about the Childhood of Famous Americans (for example) or Microbe Hunters so that they would be on their way to being informed adults. The first book to win the Newbery Medal, Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, was actually an adult book, but it was so readable it offered young people an entry into that universe of shared knowledge. Nonfiction reading was a kind of ladder into citizenship, one adults believed their children wanted to climb, and books were offered as handholds along the way. The last stand of this sense of shared knowledge may well have been James Michener’s sweeping historical epics — he filled in what readers did not know, but he did so using fiction.

  The intellectual rebellions of the 1960s, followed by the Culture Wars that lasted through the rest of the century, arrived just as cable splintered television into endless niches. We were each encouraged to learn our own branch of identity-based history, or to select which version of hard, New Age, or Intelligent Design science appealed to us. Much good came of this opening up, but there was no one book, or set of books, that every cultured family was assumed to own. We got the History Channel instead of History. For adults, this meant that nonfiction reading became a choice — one more option for adding a touch of interest to your life. While nonfiction increasingly became identified with adult pleasure reading, just the opposite happened in schools.

  The sixties challenged what it meant to be a citizen, what kind of person deserved to be seen as famous, and even the use of the term mankind; they also celebrated Youth Culture. From the Beatles to Woodstock (and on to Facebook and iTunes today), we as a society came to believe that young people would be interested in themselves, their own world, their own music, the social networks of their peers. This view has taken particular hold in schools. Teachers assume that reading for pleasure means reading about yourself, or a fantasy version of yourself. In turn, nonfiction became the province of schoolwork.

  Nonfiction books occupy two distinct and equally unhappy places in elementary and middle schools. All too often, teachers from pre-K through second grade view nonfiction as facts, and facts as a necessary evil, linked to other forms of cod-liver oil such as outlines, citations, multiplication tables, and common denominators. One study published in 2000 of elementary education in more than twenty schools found that teachers devoted just 3.6 minutes a day to nonfiction books (in schools located in poor neighborhoods, this declined to 1.9 minutes a day). Then — starting in third grade — the ominous shadow of state-mandated testing falls. At this point teachers see the need to focus on nonfiction, since their students are going to have to demonstrate reading comprehension and write expository-writing essays with a statement, three supporting facts, and a conclusion. Nonfiction becomes a big part of the classroom — but entirely as a tool, a form of test prep.

  Speaking in broad, but not too broad, generalities, those in charge of your child’s early education view fiction as reading for pleasure and nonfiction as reading for assignments. And while that changes as your child ages, those early years set a tone that shapes publishing, libraries, and the whole field of nonfiction for young readers. There are a great many nonfiction books in libraries, but the overwhelming majority of them are designed to be useful for classes. This creates two problems for you and your child — how do you pick through the clutter of assignment books, and how do you find those few nonfiction books that have been crafted for your child’s pure reading pleasure?

  For assignments, pick books that seem well researched as well as eye-catching, or pair them — a visual cornucopia with a more narrative text that gives you a sense of its sources. Take out a bunch of books on a topic and do a bit of compare-and-contrast, to catch the subtle but telling differences.

  Frustrated at the selections available at libraries, you may head off to your local bookstore. If you are lucky enough to be near a good independent children’s store, you may skip the rest of this essay. The owner or staff knows kids, knows nonfiction, and will help you. If you rely on chains, you face the second dispiriting realization: nonfiction books are everywhere, and none of them are what you want. You will see the same overpublished niches (see “What Makes a Good Dinosaur Book?”); photo-driven kid versions of coffee-table books; nonfiction movie tie-ins (most recently, pirates, pirates, pirates); a growing section of books of facts, from Guinness to the spate of retro boy books; a clearly ignored shelf of unappealing biographies; and a bit of special interest (African American, Jewish, Women-Who-Have-Made-a-Difference, sports, science experiments). If you wander over to the YA section, you will see acres of self-help books aimed at girls trained in how to read about relationships, body changes, health, dating, and fashion by popular magazines. Your child’s interest in a nonfiction book to read is as fully ignored in this clutter as it was by the school library’s devotion to assignments.

  The glaring absence in nonfiction for younger readers is precisely the kind of narrative nonfiction adults have embraced. The assumption behind those books is that a browsing reader who previously knew nothing about, say, Longitude, or Cod, or Year X that changed the world, or How the Irish Saved Civilization can be seduced by an author whose prose is supple, whose story is interesting, and whose ideas are stimulating. The overriding assumption in nonfiction for younger readers is that it must be on a familiar subject tied to an existing curriculum, or from a list of tr
ied-and-true topics — storms, diseases, Greece, Rome, knights, Vikings, sports figures, heroic women. At present, that is just the reality of the field. You are far more likely to find that kind of browsing interest in historical fiction (see “When Dinosaurs Watched Black-and-White TV”) than in nonfiction.

  Mark Kurlansky, who, along with Dava Sobel (Longitude), really changed the field for adult nonfiction, crafted a fine picture-book version of Cod (The Cod’s Tale), and a not-quite-as-successful one of Salt (The Story of Salt). But what makes his picture book work is that it is a true picture book; it is not trying to present a simplified version of adult narration. Jim Murphy’s multi-award-winning An American Plague for older readers is probably the closest thing to the achievement of adult authors: he has rendered an obscure topic (a yellow fever plague in Philadelphia in 1793) fascinating purely through the power of his writing — and clever use of book design.

  Note that Kurlansky’s book is a picture book, and even Murphy’s relies, in part, on design. What the world of children’s books has lost in missing out on the explosion in narrative nonfiction, it at least partially gets back in its attention to illustration and design. Indeed, the last informational book to win the Newbery Medal was Russell Freedman’s 1987 photobiography of Abraham Lincoln, with a text that couldn’t be separated from the pictures.

  Almost every nonfiction book for younger readers has pictures in it, and so it speaks in two voices: in words and in images. As you begin searching for nonfiction, look for both: for good writing and also for art that works well with the text. Many claim that young people today are more visual — I think that argument can be overstated. But there is a real craftsmanship in the use of art in the best children’s nonfiction that you will soon come to recognize. This craftsmanship is also present in teenage nonfiction, where the graphic-novel memoir (which adults know from books such as Maus and Persepolis) holds real promise. From Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me to Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, this is a format that manages to be accessible and challenging at the same time.