A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  32 pp. Grades K–5. Beautifully crafted poems celebrate the world that comes alive after dark; each poem is accompanied by a corresponding paragraph of information. The subtle colors of Allen’s linocut prints encourage readers to seek out the featured plant or animal gradually, just as eyes become accustomed to the dark.

  Marilyn Singer, illustrations by Josée Masse, Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse

  32 pp. Grades K–3. Through a poetic invention she dubs the reverso, Singer meditates on twelve familiar folktales and, via shifting line breaks and punctuation, their shadows. Each free-verse poem has two stanzas set on facing columns, where the second is the first reversed. Similarly bifurcated illustrations, Day-Glo bright, face the cleverly constructed and insightful poems.

  Questions about gender and reading are perennial. Otherwise free-to-be types talk about “boy books” and “girl books” with aplomb, until they notice that a boy is not reading the novel that the gender experts suggested, and that the sea of pink covers keeps some girl readers firmly on the shore. In the adult world, gender divisions in reading don’t cause much concern, even though, consistently, women read far more books than do men. But if fans of Oprah’s picks are mainly female, and more men are content with the sports section, so be it. When those same adults consider books for younger readers, however, the issue becomes more fraught — are girls being limited by reading only books about girls “just like me”? Are boys losing some basic socialization by reading about things, not people? Or are those categorizations even true?

  I’ve asked Horn Book reviewer and unrepentant Girl Reader Christine Heppermann to join me in wondering why boys don’t read more and if it’s bad for girls to read romance. Here’s some advice, though: the best thing you can give to a would-be, could-be reader, boy or girl, is access to a wide variety of reading possibilities among which he or she can find what seems just right, labels be damned.

  Contemporary realistic fiction written for girls reassures readers that what’s going on in their everyday lives matters. School stories, friendship stories, stories about falling off the stage during a ballet recital: to anyone too old to have to worry anymore about being picked last in gym, such fare can seem trivial. But the authors of these books understand that sometimes the most mundane dilemmas can be the weightiest. Sometimes it is vitally important whether you wear jeans and a tank top or a lacy thrift-store dress for the first day of school because, as Lizzie (in Claudia Mills’s Lizzie at Last) observes when grappling with this issue, “Decisions made on the first day of seventh grade would affect her for the rest of the year, maybe for the rest of her life.” Mom and great-aunt Martha will tell you that you look lovely whatever you wear; Mills and writers like her will tell you the truth.

  Honesty is a pivotal element in one of the novels that ushered in modern realistic fiction for children, Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 classic Harriet the Spy. Paradoxically, Fitzhugh comes about this honesty by promoting the message that, as sounded by Harriet’s formidable nanny, Ole Golly, “Sometimes you have to lie.” When Harriet’s classmates get hold of her spy notebook, in which she has written, among other things, scathingly critical comments about them, they express their hurt and outrage by ostracizing her, sending her into emotional turmoil. Although Harriet eventually issues a formal apology to everyone in the sixth-grade newspaper, she doesn’t waver in her conviction that writers need to tell the truth as they see it, and, inside, she remains the same judgmental Harriet, albeit with a heightened respect for the power of words. Adults didn’t always consider Fitzhugh’s warts-and-all characters, including Harriet’s rather self-absorbed, ineffectual parents, to be appropriate for children, but young readers immediately embraced Harriet the Spy, and it continues to inspire new generations of tomato-sandwich eaters and keyhole listeners.

  A lot of what Harriet the Spy brought to children’s fiction — imperfect parents, the virtues of disobedience, a gimlet-eyed view of sixth-grade society — is now old hat, but in 1964 the book was a pioneer, opening up territory hitherto unexplored or at least carefully circumscribed. With The Long Secret, the sequel to Harriet the Spy published in 1965, Fitzhugh became the first writer for children to take on the topic of menstruation, with a frankness that would be matched (and popularity surpassed) five years later with the publication of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

  Novels by this grand dame of the genre exemplify how the right book at the right time can leave a lasting impression on a reader. In Jennifer O’Connell’s collection Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (2007), essays by twenty-four women writers reveal some of the qualities that give Blume’s books staying power. A number of the contributors remember using her texts as survival guides to help them through the dense woods of adolescence. “I can’t even count the number of times I read and reread It’s Not the End of the World,” reflects essayist Kristin Harmel. “That’s because when you’re eleven and your parents are splitting up, no one realizes that you might have some real adult questions that you don’t exactly know how to ask. . . . I didn’t know how to ask those things. But Judy Blume did. And through [her character] Karen Newman, she told me the things I ached to know.”

  The term problem novel is usually a pejorative, indicating that the formula behind it is short and sweet. (Here’s a book about Divorce! Here’s a book about Bullying! And everything is going to Turn Out Fine!) Though Blume’s stories often center on a single issue, they usually manage to transcend one-word synopses, thanks to her extraordinary empathy and insight. She doesn’t preach or lecture. She’s like the ideal older sister who’s been there, done that, and won’t laugh at you or roll her eyes when you go to her for advice.

  Of course, not everyone reads realistic fiction for profound guidance. Realistic fiction can be a fantasy social club: it’s a way to meet people you might not have the courage to approach in real life. Want to get in with the popular crowd or at least know how they think? Claudia Mills forges that connection in her West Creek Middle School series when she writes, in two separate volumes, from the points of view of Alex and Marcia, the “it” boy and girl of their class. Good-looking, wisecracking Alex Ryan often intimidates the other students with his sharp-edged sense of humor, but in Alex Ryan, Stop That!, we see him intimidated by his overbearing father. Similarly, Makeovers by Marcia shows that, though the ultra-confident-seeming narrator may sport meticulously painted purple nails, her self-esteem has a few chips. The message here is more complex than “beautiful people have problems, too.” Because Mills is such a skilled writer, she also manages to highlight the qualities that make Alex and Marcia natural leaders. Still, it’s comforting for all of us lower-ranking pack members to be able to look beneath their skin and realize that no one is invulnerable.

  As the essays in Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume confirm, it’s a powerful experience to open a book and realize you are not alone. The best contemporary realistic fiction for children brings out the individuality of the characters while communicating their universal qualities. One thing we all have in common, whether we’re poised and polished Marcia or tomboy Harriet, is that, on some essential level, we all feel like misfits.

  That’s certainly the case for Millie in Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min, Girl Genius, a novel that cracks open a stereotype and looks at it from the inside. Millicent isn’t just a brainy Chinese American girl; she’s a bona fide prodigy, an eleven-year-old high-school senior, much more jazzed about her college-level summer-school class on poetry than the volleyball league her mother forces her to join so she can have, in the words of her school psychologist, “a more normal and well-rounded childhood.” As she sees nothing wrong with the current state of her childhood, Millicent is skeptical: “If my parents are implying that I’m not ‘normal,’ does that mean I am subnormal? And their brilliant solution is . . . volleyball? What is normal about forcing someone to move in rotation?”

  Not only is Millicent
the opposite of the boy-or-clothes-crazy airhead parents often expect to find in realistic fiction for girls, but Yee’s novel, accessible and humorous as it is, introduces a fairly sophisticated literary device, that of the unreliable narrator. For all her assertions that she has no need for play, friends her own age, or other childish distractions, Millie spends a fair amount of time deciding how she would sign yearbooks — most of her planned inscription is in Latin — if she had friends, or brooding about past cruelties and injustices inflicted upon her by schoolmates. When Emily, a new girl in town and fellow prisoner of volleyball league, asks Millie to sleep over, she keeps her sky-high IQ a secret and hopes that Emily “will not be put off by [her] credentials.”

  Yee gives Millicent a nemesis with an entirely different problem. Stanford Wong, the son of family friends, is popular and athletic; but, unlike Millie, he wasn’t reading Truman Capote at age six. In short, his English grades stink, and his parents hire Millicent to tutor him for the summer, an arrangement both she and he find about as pleasant as extended oral surgery. The contrast between Stanford and Millicent adds comedy and reminds readers that, although some people think otherwise — when Millie orders huevos rancheros at the college cafeteria, the cashier remarks, “I didn’t think you people liked that kind of food” — all Asians aren’t walking cerebral cortexes, and they aren’t all the same. Millicent may be an example of a type, albeit an extreme example, but she is also distinctly individual, like her peace-activist grandmother, former-homecoming-queen mother, and intermittently employed father, who enjoys playing with toys more than his daughter does.

  Do writers like Yee remember the trials of their youth better than the rest of us, or are they just more eloquent in expressing them? In some realistic novels for girls, the descriptions of feelings and events are so perceptive, so resonant, they practically turn into poetry. “Summer ripened like a piece of fruit. But it was a piece of fruit with an unseen bruise, and it was ripening and spoiling at the same time. The bruise’s name was Glenna.” Here author Lynne Rae Perkins, in the voice of narrator Debbie, foreshadows the irreparable rift between best friends that occurs in her novel All Alone in the Universe. Her story speaks to how the most devastating events in a child’s life aren’t always dramatic or obvious. Debbie and her best friend, Maureen, never get into a knockdown, drag-out fight. Their gradual unraveling happens much more quietly. Another girl, Glenna, starts spending time with Maureen, and at first Debbie considers her too trivial to cause concern. “To me, she was like one of those crumbs of wax that flake off the milk carton into your glass and you drink it anyway. It’s too much trouble to fish it out, and it’s not going to kill you.” But when Debbie’s friendship-twosome with Maureen more and more frequently becomes a threesome, Debbie slowly and painfully awakens to the reality that something is changing, and it is beyond her control.

  Novels like All Alone in the Universe are important. They let kids know that someone is paying attention to the awkward, joyous, triumphant, and sad moments in their everyday lives; that even if there is no national memorial devoted to broken middle-school friendships, such books are here, like lit candles, to commemorate their passing.

  The library in Mrs. Koff’s third-grade classroom was sad, just a few milk crates stacked to form a small makeshift bookcase. I remember dreading “free read” time because inevitably I would stand in front of that classroom library, scanning those familiar books, hoping something new would magically appear, a book that would suddenly make me like to read. But, truthfully, I was starting to give up on that dream.

  Back then I read only when I was forced to for school. I would have liked to read books about kids like myself, but most of the African American books available at the time were historical fiction and, while I read and liked them OK, I just didn’t feel that spark of connection, that invisible something, that made the books impossible to put down. The characters in those novels didn’t speak the way my friends and I spoke. They didn’t live where I lived. And their problems weren’t the kinds of problems my friends and I ever had to deal with. Bottom line: I couldn’t relate.

  Enter Judy Blume.

  I was in fourth grade when my teacher encouraged me to read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I admit I was reluctant. I mean, was I, a little girl from the Bronx, supposed to care about Margaret, a girl who in the beginning of the book actually complains about having to move into a big, beautiful house in a nice suburban neighborhood? Really?

  But in spite of myself, I was hooked by page four. No, Margaret didn’t look like me, and certainly her life wasn’t anything like mine. But she was real to me. More real than the characters in any of the other books I had read up to that point. Inside — the way she thought and felt, her secret desires and fears — she was just like me.

  Pretty soon I was reading more of Judy Blume’s books. I found it easy to put myself in her characters’ shoes and understand their conflicts, no matter how different they were from mine. I enjoyed losing myself in their worlds. For the first time, I enjoyed reading!

  Those books inspired me. As a matter of fact, if you had asked me back then, I would have told you I was going to grow up to be the black Judy Blume! I wanted to write girl books. But more specifically, I wanted to write books about black girls, primarily for black girls. More than anything, I wanted to write books that would reach those girls at just the right time in their lives and, hopefully, become as meaningful to them as Judy Blume’s books were (and still are) to me.

  To legions of tween and teen girl readers, Alice McKinley has been a trusted friend and guide for more than twenty years. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice has been navigating life’s obstacle course from her first appearance in The Agony of Alice (1985), when she was in sixth grade; at this writing, she’s a senior in high school. Each book in the series takes place over a few months, typically a school semester or summer vacation, mirroring the rhythm of readers’ lives. Alice leads a middle-class existence in suburban Maryland with her widowed father and older brother. (Alice’s mother died when she was in kindergarten; her absence prompts Alice to consciously study the women around her as a measure of her own identity and for a better understanding of what her future might look like.) While Alice’s interests and problems change realistically along the way, she can be counted on to offer honest and authentic observations about family and friends, school and boys, body image and self-perception, sexuality and values.

  That’s not to say Alice has all the answers. She’d be the first to say she doesn’t, and that’s a big part of what makes her such a likable and easy-to-relate-to character. Whereas her best friends, Pamela and Elizabeth, are firmly entrenched in their positions (thrill-seeking risk taker and naive, good Catholic girl, respectively), Alice doesn’t approach life with ready solutions, sending girls a reassuring message that it’s OK not to know everything. Realistically imperfect, Alice makes mistakes and faces the consequences. She models how to survive life’s inevitable embarrassments and errors of judgment — reassuring readers that they, too, will survive.

  One of the series’ hallmarks is straightforward, nonthreatening information about sex and sexuality, which speaks to girls’ normal curiosity and evolves naturally as Alice grows more aware of herself as a sexual being. At twelve, for example, Alice ponders the logistics of French kissing: “You probably had to start planning it early in the morning and be careful what you ate all day so your mouth wouldn’t taste like onions or anything.” By eighth grade, her questions are more advanced, as when she bravely asks her cousin, “Carol, what does intercourse really, really feel like for a woman?” (The trickiest aspect of the Alice books is to know where to jump into the series — tweens may want to stick with the earlier titles, when Alice is in middle school; the titles set in Alice’s late-high-school years are more appropriate for older teens.)

  Alice’s father and (more reluctantly) her brother field the bulk of her forthright questions with respect and humor — often at the dinner table. This family o
penness is idealized, but it’s an ideal to strive for: Alice’s frank talk about sexuality over roast chicken might inspire her readers to talk with a trusted adult about a sensitive topic. And for some readers — probably many — Alice gives voice to what they can’t.

  Sharing shelf space with the many girl-focused tween/teen series about queen-bee cliques, princesses, and Hollywood starlets, the Alice books stand out as a whole lot more substantial. Escaping into the world of prom queens and promiscuous nannies is easy; what’s hard is finding one’s way in the ordinary, everyday world. Reading about Alice’s experiences with bullying, prejudice, peer pressure, and boyfriends — to name just a few topics — is a rehearsal of sorts for modern-day real life. At their heart, these books are encouraging lessons in developing and maintaining all kinds of healthy relationships: with family, with friends, with boyfriends or girlfriends, and, most importantly, with oneself.

  Growing up in a Bengali household in the Bay area, I wasn’t eager to leave girlhood. My two older sisters had done it, and it didn’t look like fun. American guys started pursuing them, which meant an increase in monitoring and interrogation at home. Relatives discussed their potential to marry good Bengali boys, evaluating positives and negatives as though my sisters were mangoes for sale at the market. I watched with trepidation as my sisters’ free, strong selves disappeared behind a burka of femininity. And it wasn’t just in the culture of our origin. Most of the American masculine world seemed more interested in my sisters’ curves than in their opinions.

  If growing up meant that gender commandeered your personhood, who wanted that? Not me. That’s why my fourteen-year-old crush, redheaded Brian McElroy, stayed locked in my daydreams where he belonged, and I shunned him at school. I knew exactly why Peter Pan flew back to Neverland.