New Websites for Established Organizations

The Horn Book, is one of my favorite magazines. In fact, I have the new one floating around the house somewhere. Well, it has done a big revision to its website and now has all kinds of information. This could be a really useful site.

Books to Dreams was established back in 1996 and has just set up its website. The organization provides new and like new books for children in need. A few years ago I was contacted by a teacher in Hartford looking for good used books for her classroom. I contacted Books to Dreams, and the people there were happy to help the teacher out. Books can definitely provide comfort and escape for people who find themselves in unfortunate circumstances. And literacy can help them get out of those unfortunate circumstances. Books have a role to play in improving life for children.

My Latest Obsession and Me

I wrote probably five or six sentences today, spread over two different projects. I did do some journal work relating to things I hope to write in the future, but real work...five or six sentences.

This reminds me of the movie The Hours, which I was talking about yesterday. I so relate to Virginia Woolf as she was portrayed in that movie--inept at housekeeping (she couldn't manage her help; if I had household help I would make them coffee and buy them doughnuts every day)and taking forever to squeeze out a sentence or two. Plus one morning she went for a walk, to which her husband said something like, "I wish I could just go for a walk in the middle of the day." Tomorrow I'm supposed to go for an eight-mile hike. Not that anyone will complain, but people would be justified if they did.

Oh, well. Enough whining.

A Couple of Links

The Golden Duck Awards are given for excellence in children's science fiction literature. I had some trouble figuring out what group sponsors this award, but it also seems to sponsor some kind of kid science fiction conference.

Then I heard about America Writes for Kids is a project that collects and organizes children's author websites by state so that kids and teachers can find local writers.

My New Obsession

I'm finally off Lizard Motel, and now I'm on to Virginia Woolf.

I had my first experience reading Woolf about three and a half years ago when I was taking a graduate course. We read a Woolf essay about going shopping for a pen. Or a pencil. I was...intrigued. Then last year I read To the Lighthouse. I was...intrigued. Last week I saw The Hours, which is about three women loosely connected by the book Mrs. Dalloway, one of the three women being Virginia Woolf who wrote Mrs. Dalloway. I was...intrigued.

By that point I wanted to read Mrs. Dalloway, but, of course, our library didn't have it. So instead I saw the movie version. I was...intrigued. Especially by Vanessa Redgrave who plays Mrs. Dalloway and is constantly talking about "my parrrrrty," which she is giving that very night.

As my two regular readers will tell you, there must be a kidlit connection to this ramble or I wouldn't be rambling it here. And, sure enough, there is. Virginia Woolf wrote a children's story called Nurse Lugton's Curtain. And I just read that it was found among the pages of the manuscript for...Mrs. Dalloway! How cool is that?

So Long to Lizard Motel

I finished reading Welcome to Lizard Motel about a week ago, and the book will be due at the library soon, so it's time to wrap up this discussion.

In a nutshell, I found this book disappointing. I think the questions Feinberg raises are legitimate ones and questions that the kidlit community ought to take seriously and discuss. But she doesn't discuss them, she just raises them. And the memoir portion of the book drags the narrative down.

I happened to buy the May/June issue of Poets and Writers, which carries an article by Sven Birkerts called Then, Again: Memoir and the Work of Time. In talking of his own memoir writing, he says, "...I discerned the possibility of hidden patterns, patterns that, if unearthed and understood, would somehow explain me--my life--to myself." He also says that what some other memoirs have in common is that "their deeper purpose is to discover the connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense."

I think that is what Feinberg is trying to do in Lizard Motel--she's trying to make sense of her reaction and responses to problem novels by looking for patterns in her life that relate to that reaction and response or that support her reaction and response. I know it's presumptuous of me to say so, but I wonder if the patterns she finds are patterns at all. She admits at one point that she's obsessed with the problem novel issue. She may just be seeing problem novel connections whether they are necessarily there or not.

For instance, she talks about the children who attend the afterschool writing workshops she conducts and describes how they like to play that they are orphans. And of these desire to play this game she says, "Do problem novels, with their attention to lone and lonely children in dire conditions, capitalize on this naturally occurring fantasy in childhood, namely to be a self-reliant, free orphan? Do they piggy-back in?" Once again, she doesn't answer this question or pursue it. But I wonder if she doesn't have the whole issue backward. Is the orphan fantasy about being a self-reliant, free orphan or is it a way for children to workout a way to emotionally survive their greatest fear--being orphaned? And, if so, do problem books capitalize on this fear or are they an instrument kids can use, should they want to, to help deal with it?

Feinberg also talks about her own child's anxiety over an upcoming surgery. She eventually brings her daughter to a psychiatrist who asks the girl to describe what she feels.

"'That I will lose Mommy," she says. "That they put that thing over me to go to sleep." Then she adds in a little voice, "And I'm afraid I'll fade away.'

"He asks, 'Are you afraid you'll die?'

"I lurch in my seat. Shut up! I want to scream. Are you crazy? Why are you talking like that to my little girl? Why the hell are you speaking of death? She's only seven!

"But she has brightened. 'Yes,' she is saying. 'Yes! That's it exactly!'"

And the doctor then goes on to talk to the little girl about her fears. After they are done, Feinberg says to the doctor. "'I could never talk about that with her'...'About death. Are you sure it's a good idea? Won't it make her more scared?'"

The doctor's response is, "'No, the opposite. It will make her more prepared...It is your fears that make it difficult to discuss it with her. It's too scary for you.'"

Feinberg then relates this experience to her feelings about problem novels. "How is it that facing the truth about reality, especially a harsh reality, causes such revitalization?...Why is this so obviously helpful, while reality as presented in problem novels seems more often merely unsettling?"

Well, I don't know that that's true. Maybe what the doctor has to say about talking with children with death relates to problem novels, too. Maybe not all kids find them unsettling. Maybe it's adult fears that makes problem books unsettling.

I am not feeling as negatively about problem books as I did before I read Lizard Motel, which I believe is just the opposite of what Feinberg hoped her readers' response would be. I do feel, though, that kids have to be ready for them, and I just don't know how the adult world can tell if individual children are ready for them. So perhaps younger children should be left to find them on their own. If a kid comes upon a problem book and wants to read it, that's probably a sign she's ready. If it's on a mandatory reading list for sixth grade, who knows?

I guess now that my main objection to many of the problem novels I've read is that I don't feel they're particularly well written. A lot of them seem similar to one another, no matter who is writing them. There often isn't a theme unique to an individual author, a world view unique to an individual author. They've become formula books for me, a formula that a lot of the adult world just adores.

To make me like a problem book, the author has to make character and plot as important as the problem, as Meg Rosoff does in How I Live Now. A problem, by itself, just doesn't sell me on a book.

And now I think I have just about exhausted this topic. For the time being.

Pain and Suffering

Two days ago I spent a half hour updating this blog, then went to upload it. Blogger was doing some kind of maintenance, and I lost the whole thing. Do not tell me I should have saved my work.

Then yesterday I redid only half the original post because I was working on a laptop for the first time because both our other computers were being used. Can you believe? In most families the PC gathers dust, but here two aren't enough for us. Anyway, who were laptops designed for? Children? It was agony typing on it.

This Could be the Start of Something Decent

I read the first in a series called The Stink Files by Holm and Hamel, who are into being mysterious. The book is a clever takeoff on spy stories with a cat as a James Bond type. There are two more books, so far, in the series.

Today's Lizard Motel Update

I picked up a very nice looking copy of The Pigman by Paul Zindel on Saturday because Barbara Feinberg talks about it in Lizard Motel. Feinberg is a great one for asking questions and then dropping them without answering them or even giving much of a discussion. In relation to The Pigman she raises questions about whether or not there are times in children's lives when a problem book can have great meaning for them and whether having edgy, rebelious books assigned by a teacher, along with worksheets and assignments ruins them.

I think those are both good questions. I wish Feinberg had talked about ways to get the right book to the right child at the right time and how to save the reading experience from being beaten to death at school. But she didn't.

I, myself, think I've only recently become developmentally ready for Virgina Woolf. And I don't know if I'll ever be developmentally ready for Kate Chopin.

An Underground Book Marketing Economy?

At the writer-type sites I favor there has been a lot of talk about the poor state of publishing, mainly because books aren't being sold, advances aren't being earned, thus meaning that writers aren't able to sell subsequent books.

However, second hand bookstores are supposed to be doing well. And what's more, there are so many ways to buy second hand books. Bookstores are selling them on Amazon as well as on ebay where private citizens are also selling books they no longer want. And what about library book sales which are primarily used books? A library near here makes nearly twenty thousand dollars twice a year at its sales.

The point I am making, here, is that people are buying books, they just aren't buying new ones, which many people are finding too pricie. As far as the publishing world is concerned, though, used books don't register because writers and publishers don't make anything on them. We only make money on books once, the first time they're sold.

I'm not complaining. I just find this interesting.

Irony All Over the Place

So, I'm having this big, analytical experience reading Welcome to Lizard Motel, which is all about the author's responses to "problem books"--angst- ridden stories involving grim problems that a young protagonist must over come. Or not. And what should I stumble upon while I'm reading that but How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff.

How I Live Now begins with a stereotypical problem novel protagonist. Daisy is anorexic, her mother died when she was born, she's hostile toward her father and stepmother, she's put in her share of time with psychiatrists, and she tells her story in the first person. Sounds like everything I dislike, right? But very early on in the book, Rosoff sends Daisy off to visit relatives in England, thus placing this stereotypical problem teen in an eccentric English children's story. And then, on page 24, Rosoff sends all these kids off into a war story by having London attacked by unnamed forces. There's even a little dystopian thing going on.

This is a book in which the author pays as much attention to the story and characters as she does to the problems she saddles them with. That is the difference between a good problem book and a bad one.

And Daisy, Rosoff's main character, has a wonderful, wonderful voice. She's a marvelous character, a teen with some mental health issues who is forced to become the sane one. I believe I've said it before--one really fantastic character can make a book.

I wasn't crazy about the ending, but even that was a nod to what I think is the most famous dystopian novel of the late 20th Century, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. (I wasn't crazy about how that book ended, either.) And I feel obligated to point out that there is a sexual situation that some readers might find...hmmm...creepy? disturbing? distasteful? It's not that large a part of the story, but I thought I should mention it.

So, I was finding that kind of ironic, loving a problem book while I was reading Lizard Motel. The other ironic feeling I've been getting lately is that I find Lizard Motel, well, sort of like a problem book. There's the heavy tone to the writing, the "something very, very serious is happening here" that often accompanies problem books. Then Feinberg tells us that her parents divorced, she was thrown out of school, and she ran away from home, herself, when she was a teenager. She tells a story about a child who became mute after being traumatized by a surgery she had to endure. She also describes how, when she was a daycare teacher, she decided to explain to her charges what a hostage is. (She wishes someone had stopped her. I bet some of those kids do, too.) It seemed as if the kinds of "problems" that might appear in a problem novel, kept coming up in her narrative.

I Love These Kids

Daddy's Law deals with the chore of getting kids to read what's good for them. I know I should be totally supportive of that, but... (Thanks to Blog of a B.S.)

Today's Lizard Motel Entry

Today, children, we will discuss Feinberg's feelings about magic. She feels that it is missing from children's realistic and problem novels. She's not talking about fantasy novels here. She believes that children turn to magic or play, even more so when they are stressed and traumatized, say, in a problem novel. "For all children, except in cases of extreme pathology, there is to a greater or lesser degree a corresponding magical, imaginative counterpart to experience...

"And it is precisely this dimension to childhood experience that is absent from many realistic novels and virtually all problem novels. No magic, manifest or latent, vibrates within them." pgs. 42-43

I think Feinberg is romanticizing childhood a bit here. Or a lot. She talks about these books lacking authenticity and not being childlike. I think she's close to something with that, but not because a child's romanticized imagination is missing. I don't think there's something missing in these books that should be there; I think there's something in them that shouldn't be--interests that are primarily adult in nature.

The desire to dwell on problems and traumas is, to make an overgeneralization I'm sure, an adult interest, not a child's. Children just aren't aware of a lot that's going on around them, unless it happens to have to do directly with them. They start out life self-centered for good reason--they can't care for themselves and have to make a lot of noise about their needs in order to get adults to take care of them. Interest in the greater world and the problems of others comes slowly. I'm not saying kids are selfish and insensitive; they just haven't developed those traits in a generalized sort of way as highly as they will later. When they're adults.

Traditionally, kids have been interested in mystery stories (they involve solving a problem and bringing the universe back into order) and science fiction and fantasy (where all kinds of dangerous things can happen in a world remote from their own). There are very logical reasons for kids to like these kinds of stories. They're safe.

I'm not saying that these are the only kinds of books that should be out there for kids, and we'll get to why in another posting. (Well, besides the reason that we have freedom of speech and the press in this country, of course.) I'm just saying that I often find kid problem books forced and contrived not because of a lack of anything but because adults have imposed their own interests upon them.

Art Books...Sort Of

I read Ms. Hannah Is Bananas! by Dan Gutman as part of my continuing survey of books for readers in the lower grades. Oddly enough, though this book is part of a series, My Weird School I wasn't actually able to find reviews of it. Promotional material but not reviews. Whatever that means.

I thought this was a well-intentioned book. It exposes kids to terms like modern art, performance art, and kinetic sculptures. If I were the mom of young children, I'd definitely be bringing this book home from the library for them.

However, like so many kids' books, it's written in the first person. And, personally, I find that a lot of these first person narrators sound alike, with somewhat forced humor developed around the idea that adults are weird. Even though that is the case, the sameness of all these books means that not much stands out in the field.

I can't tell whether or not Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier was written as a Young Adult book, but the Young Adult Library Services Association named it a best book for 2001 so that justifies me writing about it here. I just finished it this morning. It qualifies as an art book as far as I'm concerned not just because it claims to be about Vermeer's maid, but because that maid could talk intelligently about the art she saw in Vermeer's studio. At least to this ignorant reader it sounded as if she did. The period detail in this book is marvelous. Not because I know all about the period and can assure you that it's authentic but because the writing is so good that I didn't feel that I was reading a historical novel. I didn't feel that a lot of historical research was being stuffied down my throat. I very much liked Griet, the main character, and I like how her life turned out. This is a strong young woman who did what was best for herself.

So there, folks, I liked a book.

Today's Thoughts About Lizard Motel

Just today at Readerville someone asked "What is a problem novel?" I opened up Welcome to Lizard Motel to a passage I'd marked and what did I find but a description, quoting and paraphrasing Sheila Egoff> Feinberg says:

She defines the problem novel as a subgenre of the realistic adolescent novel: it tends to be narrower in focus, less rich in narrative scope, and at times feels "as if the writers had begun with the problem rather than the plot or characters." The problem novel is most often about a "child defined by the terminology of pain."

Feinberg gives characteristics of the novel, again paraphrasing Egoff, some of which are: an alienated protagonist hostile toward adults, often a first-person narrator, often told in the vernacular, dialogue predominates, settings often urban, parents are absent, either physically or emotionally.

I wish the book had an index so I could see if she talks more about the "problem novel" in other places. But it doesn't. So I'll just have to see what more she has to say about definitions, characteristics, significance, and on and on. I also wish that if this definition is bogus, her critics had picked her up on it and given a correct one. But to my knowledge, they didn't.

Another List of Notables

I've never heard of the Children's Literature Assembly, but it has put out a list of Notable Children's Books in the English Language Arts, which was mentioned at both Child-Lit and Kids Lit. I haven't read a single book on the list. Which means I can't complain about them.

Gail's Lizard Motel Reading Journal

Welcome to my thoughts as I read Welcome to Lizard Motel by Barbara Feinberg. Many critics of Feinberg's book bring up the fact that she has an objection to Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. But Feinberg's objection is interesting because, the way I read it, she's not just claiming Terabithia is a downer and unsuitable for that reason. What Feinberg says is:

Why in the world did you (Paterson) kill off your character? To make a point? I berate her: You didn't set the death up right. You didn't prepare us. On some level we have to be prepared. I wasn't aware, even subliminally, of a dark forewarning: no haunting undertone. This was a complete shock. Even a shock should reverberate somehow. An ending should be a manifestation, should have a feeling of necessity to it. Your book posed no question, even unconsciously, that this death answers. Random and artificially constructed. (Page 17)

It seems to me that what Feinberg is doing here is not complaining that the book has a sad ending. She's talking about the quality of the writing. She's talking about construction, foreshadowing, and plot. That is a totally different thing than just ranting about sad books, which is what she's often criticized for doing.

I have never read Bridge to Terabithia, though I've known of teenagers who loved it. I have no reason to think the book is poorly written. But the questions Feinberg raises about the book are legitimate questions to raise about any book. Personally, I've read a number of problem books with one-dimensional characters, stereotypical antagonists, contrived plots, and cliched, politically correct situations. (I have no objection to political correctness; cliches, however, are a totally different thing.) And I've often wondered, are these books allowed to slip through the cracks because critics and editors are so taken with the problem at their cores?

Feinberg doesn't pursue the question of writing quality with Bridge to Terabithia. At least, she hasn't so far. I'll be interested to see if she'll have more to say about the quality issue later in her book.