Children’s Books

From Book Browse:

This article relates to The Magician’s Daughter

Bridget (known as Biddy), the protagonist of H. G. Parry’s The Magician’s Daughter, grows up on the magical, hidden island of Hy-Brasil, with only her father, the mage Rowan O’Connell, and his familiar, a rabbit named Hutchincroft. She is greatly influenced by the stories of heroines she reads about in her father’s library; female literary figures with whom she identifies and who help shape her character and moral compass. Their influence proves crucial when, in 1912 at the age of 16, Biddy has to leave the island to right past wrongs and face the challenges of the human world. Biddy’s coming of age from an idyllic, magical childhood to a cruel, harsh awakening follows in the footsteps of her heroines, such as Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, and Sara Crewe from A Little Princess.

The library of Biddy’s youth is filled with volumes that today’s readers might consider classics of children’s literature, but would have been fairly new at the time. Fiction written specifically for children and adolescents has its origins in the 18^th century. Prior to this, the oral tradition of nursery rhymes and published religious verses such as Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs for the Use of Children (1715) was used to inculcate morals and values. Fairy tales, such as those by Madame D’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault, with their predominantly female protagonists, were not originally intended for children. Nor was the first fairy tale published in English in 1621, which featured a male hero, Tom Thumb, already a well-known figure from folklore. In his 1730 stage play The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, Henry Fielding used the same male character to comment satirically on gender roles of the time — and, indeed, Tom Thumb himself would usually be played by a female child actress.

In 1749, Sarah Fielding, Henry’s sister, included two fairy tales in her novel The Governess, or Little Female Academy. This book is considered to be the first English-language novel written for children and it is notable that all its characters are female. The eldest pupil, Miss Jenny, leads by example, recounting the story of her life to teach the others how to aspire to goodness and happiness; all the other girls then tell the stories of their lives as well. A few years later, in 1765, John Newbery, the first major publisher of children’s books, published The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, an anonymously written story of the poor but intelligent and virtuous Margery Meadwell, who is ultimately rewarded for her innate nobility and diligence.

By the 19^th century, children’s literature had begun to evolve away from religious-themed morality tales as society became more secularized. Elements of magic and fantasy permeated children’s stories with the advent of Edgar Taylor’s 1823 translation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and the 1846 publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. Although male protagonists continued to appear in popular works of the time such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), the most influential, enduring, and famous of 19^th century children’s books feature a female main character: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872). The heroine, Alice, is an exceptionally bright seven-year-old girl who enters dream worlds highly influenced by Edward Lear’s nonsense verses, juxtaposed with the darkness and chaos of traditional nursery rhymes. Carroll’s mentor, the Scottish author George MacDonald, deserves to be as well-known today as his protégé, being the creator of such memorable female protagonists as Tangle of The Golden Key (1867), Princess Irene of The Princess and the Goblins(1872), and Rosamunde and Agnes of The Lost Princess: A Double Story (1875).

Link to the rest at Book Browse

From The Nation:

The United States can be a harsh place to be a child. There are guns galore and bullies in school. Suicide is on the rise, homelessness is rampant, and many school budgets have been scraped down to the bone. In New York City, almost one in five children are poor. One in seven doesn’t have enough to eat. Even well-off youngsters struggle with sexual abuse, depression, stress, and the cruelty of online life. Thank God there is one place where all is sweetness and light, or will be soon—children’s books.

You may have read that Roald Dahl’s classic tales have been altered to be, well, nicer. Because as we all know, niceness is what Roald Dahl is all about. Forget the misanthropy, physical disgust, and delight in transgression and violence and extravagance that give his stories bite and edge. Forget, too, the dependence of wit and vividness on specific, concrete words, on their sounds and evocative associations. What matters is that no one in the whole world be offended and that no opportunity be missed for moral improvement.

The Roald Dahl Story Company and Puffin, Dahl’s authorized publisher, have teamed up with a group called Inclusive Minds, “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature.” The organization turned the task of sanitizing Dahl over to their sensitivity readers, the oddly named Inclusivity Ambassadors, who have “lived experience” and can provide “valuable input.” If they sound like smooth-talking authoritarians, that’s not far off. In the world of children’s lit these days, sensitivity is king. But are actual readers—parents and children—calling out for the removal of the word “black” describing tractors or for replacing “North Africa” with “lots of different countries”? Do they object to describing a voice as “screechy” instead of “annoying”? I don’t know why Dahl is being censored—hopes of higher profits by Netflix, which owns the rights to his books and the movies made from them? Fear of social-justice Twitter? Did it start out as a few modest tweaks but got out of hand? In any case, there’s a loss in these changes—in vivacity, vigor, concreteness. As any good writer can tell you, we all know what a screechy voice sounds like, but an annoying one could be anything.

The Ambassadors have made hundreds of changes—59 in The Witches alone. At first, I thought a few were justifiable. Dahl was oddly obsessed with fatness and unattractiveness and used these qualities to mock unlikable characters. In the new editions, every single use of “fat” and “ugly” has been removed. I see the point: We know a lot more now than a few generations ago about how children suffer when others make fun of their appearance, and how long-lasting the harm is. But I don’t know that replacing “fat” with “enormous” sends a different message, or that replacing “fat little brown mouse” with “little brown mouse” does much for the cause of kindness—doesn’t fat also suggest cute and cuddly, at least in small furry animals? The trouble is, once you start fiddling, where do you stop? Why not leave the books alone, and if people are so offended, they can stop reading them (which I doubt will happen any time soon)? The alternative is the falsification of history and the dumbing-down of great literature.

Be that as it may, most of the changes have no such therapeutic rationale. They seem more like the work of an over-caffeinated undergraduate relying on those lists activists write up of Words to Avoid. “Crazy” becomes “silly,” while “idiot,” “nutty,” “screwy,” and other mental-health-related colloquialisms are deleted. “Mother “and “father” become “parents,” “brother and sister” are “siblings,” “boys and girls” are “children,” “ladies and gentlemen” are “folks.” (Sadly missing is my favorite degenderizing neologism, “nibling,” for niece or nephew, which sounds like something you’d find in a can of corn, or maybe an opera by Wagner). But the Ambassadors don’t stop with simple word changes. Compare these passages from The Witches:

2001: “Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “You can’t go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.”

2022: “Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

It helps to consider the actual story. The Witches wear wigs because they are bald, and they wear gloves to hide their claws. Touching their wigs would be a dangerous thing to do. Besides, the story takes place at a witches’ convention, where it is unlikely the child narrator is going to meet an ultra-orthodox woman in a sheitel or a chemo patient or a woman who simply enjoys playing with her appearance. But never mind the context: The important thing is to remember that wigs are okay! Be nice! Even if it means adding a preachy smiley face to a book written by an angry genius.

And what about this change in Matilda? Dahl is describing the joy of reading:

2001: She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.

2022: She went to nineteenth-century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck.

Take away those olden-day sailing ships and all the adventure is gone. I love Jane Austen, but the constrained world of Regency country gentry simply doesn’t convey the excitement and danger and unfamiliarity Dahl was going for. As for John Steinbeck’s California, it was a grim and prosaic place. What child has ever said, Oh, to be on the road with the Joads! And why is that old imperialist Kipling gone but not Hemingway, whose African stories heavily feature white men hunting now-endangered species and drinking too much? Isn’t Hemingway kind of a colonizer too? Perhaps the next edition will replace him with Mary Oliver.

Link to the rest at The Nation

From Slate:

I’ve read Roald Dahl’s books to little kids for years. Let me tell you how that really goes.

As it happens, I have spent quite a lot of time over the past decade reading Roald Dahl books with small children as part of a side hustle in tutoring English. Matilda, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits: all of them. All these books have moments in them that are a little sticky for modern readers, and that you can contextualize for children, if you want to. I think, from experience, that even small children are capable of understanding something like “In the past, more people thought it was OK to be rude about people who were different from them, but now we don’t do that because it’s upsetting/unfair/wrong.” Dahl’s books are full of material that needs a little explaining to kids, but perhaps more importantly here, the world’s full of other children’s books. I choose to read these to kids because I feel comfortable helping kids through them. It is not required.

As it happens, I have spent quite a lot of time over the past decade reading Roald Dahl books with small children as part of a side hustle in tutoring English. Matilda, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits: all of them. All these books have moments in them that are a little sticky for modern readers, and that you can contextualize for children, if you want to. I think, from experience, that even small children are capable of understanding something like “In the past, more people thought it was OK to be rude about people who were different from them, but now we don’t do that because it’s upsetting/unfair/wrong.” Dahl’s books are full of material that needs a little explaining to kids, but perhaps more importantly here, the world’s full of other children’s books. I choose to read these to kids because I feel comfortable helping kids through them. It is not required.

I mention all of this, obviously, because of a new episode in a doomed and stupid enterprise of our times: Yet again, adults are getting angry online about children’s books. It was announced earlier this week that the Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to the late author’s books, worked in conjunction with Puffin, the books’ publisher, and a collective who campaign to make children’s literature more inclusive, on what they call “small and carefully considered” changes to the texts, to ensure Dahl’s books “continue to be enjoyed by all children today.” These have apparently included changes to language regarding things like weight, mental health, gender, violent behavior, and race, and whole extra sentences added about topics such as why it’s OK for women to wear wigs, in The Witches.

What’s interesting about this unneeded controversy is that I haven’t so far seen anybody, anywhere on the political spectrum, who thinks this is a good idea. Loudmouths on the right think it’s “woke cancel culture” nonsense, and loudmouths on the left think it smacks of literary censorship. So why has this happened?

Listen: Roald Dahl was a ******. This is known. In an infamous 1983 interview, he said that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. Maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.” He was, by some accounts, a more general racist, a misogynist, a bully. I understand the publisher’s impulse to look at these works, which bear marks of the views of their author, and want to try to buff them to a higher shine under the gaze of the contemporary world. Generally, though, I don’t think it serves anybody very well if we scrub away everything that is troubling in this way.

It’s uncomfortable that the world has changed, and that many cultural works of a time before now still exist and are enjoyable. Sometimes, it’s an obvious move to make small changes to a literary text to update it for modern audiences. Surely few would dispute, for example, that changing the name of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None from what it used to be removed offensive language while preserving the value of the work.

But what’s happened here is more extensive, and much less obvious in its merit. What Puffin has actually done in this case is a mess. For instance, Augustus Gloop will be “enormous” rather than “fat.” This performs no sensitivity purpose, because the character is fat. Much of his strand of the plot revolves around this fact. And even taking the word “fat” out at all implies that fat is an insult in and of itself, rather than a descriptor of one possible body type. What has been achieved here?

This whole thing also seems like a misunderstanding about what is appealing about the world of Roald Dahl in the first place. Or not, in fact, a misunderstanding, but something closer to a cynical attempt to sanitize the I.P. before Netflix gets their hands on it to pump out a load of new Dahl adaptations, as they will be doing in the coming years after a deal with the Roald Dahl Story Company. Puffin can change lines like “so I shipped them all over here—every man, woman and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe” to “so, they all agreed to come over—each and every Oompa Loompa.” Fine, but do we now need more detail on how the Oompa-Loompas are being compensated fairly for their work? Does any child in the world give a shit about that? I’m being facetious, but the point is that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a horrible little story in many ways. Changing specific phrases doesn’t change the shape of these books themselves. They are nasty books. Dahl was a nasty writer for adults as well: His short stories are some of the most memorable and twisted things I’ve read. The Twits is about a husband and a wife torturing each other for fun. In Matilda, a little boy is forced to eat an entire chocolate cake until he is almost sick as a punishment. In George’s Marvelous Medicine, George kills his grandmother by shrinking her out of existence. The nastiness is a feature, not a bug.

Link to the rest at Slate

Welcome to the world of no redemption. Never forgetting without learning anything.

From The Washington Examiner:

The decision to revise some of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books to make them more inclusive was met with widespread condemnation over the weekend.

Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, and the Roald Dahl Story Co., which manages the works’ copyright and trademarks, told Britain’s Telegraph for a report published Friday that the two collaborated with Inclusive Minds, a collective that works on making children’s literature more inclusive, to make the hundreds of changes. Critics of Dahl, who remained a vocal anti-Semite until his death in 1990, have argued that some of his works are bigoted.

Renowned author Salman Rushdie , whose novel The Satanic Verses led Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa in 1989 calling on all Muslims to kill him, denounced the changes to Dahl’s works.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” Rushdie tweeted Saturday. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”

Actor Brian Cox, who currently stars in HBO’s Succession and has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, decried the revisions by likening them to McCarthyism.

“I really do believe [these books are] of their time and they should be left alone,” he told the Times of London in a radio interview. “Roald Dahl was a great satirist, apart from anything else. It’s disgraceful.”

“It’s this kind of form of McCarthyism, this woke culture, which is absolutely wanting to reinterpret everything and redesign and say, ‘Oh, that didn’t exist.'” he continued. “Well. it did exist. We have to acknowledge our history.”

Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free expression in literature and other art, said her organization was “alarmed” by news of the changes.

“If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society,” Nossel wrote on Twitter.

Laura Hackett, a lifelong Dahl fan who serves as deputy literary editor for London’s Sunday Times newspaper, vowed to collect old, unaltered copies of Dahl’s works for her children while condemning the revisions.

Link to the rest at The Washington Examiner and thanks to K. for the tip.

PG says all the “inclusive” alterations he has seen in books written by good authors has been ruinous.

From Business Insider:

The latest editions of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s books have been altered to remove words such as “fat,” “ugly,” and “mad,” The Telegraph first reported.

Roald Dahl, who died in 1990, is one of the most successful authors of all time. His 43 books — including more than 20 children’s books — have sold more than 250 million copies, according to WordsRated.

In a note at the beginning of the new editions, which The Telegraph cited, the publisher Puffin said some text had been rewritten to ensure that Dahl’s books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

The Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the copyright of Roald Dahl’s books and collaborated with Puffin to update the texts, said that “the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit” of the original books had not been lost.

. . . .

Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company hired sensitivity readers from Inclusive Minds, which calls itself “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature.”

The word “fat” has been cut from all of Dahl’s kids’ books, according to The Telegraph. Augustus Gloop, from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” is now simply “enormous” rather than “enormously fat.” Aunt Sponge, from “James and the Giant Peach”, is no longer “the fat one.”

The publisher has also removed the word “ugly.” Rather than being “ugly and beastly,” Mrs. Twit of “The Twits” is now simply “beastly.” The publisher has also cut terms such as “crazy” and “mad,” which Dahl used on numerous occasions.

. . . .

The new editions also try to modernize the books’ portrayal of women. The suggestion that something might be “not ladylike” has been switched to “undignified” in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

The publisher has also replaced references to “female” characters: In “Matilda,” Miss Trunchbull — once a “most formidable female” — is now a “most formidable woman.”

In “The Witches,” a paragraph explaining that the much-feared witches are bald underneath their wigs now adds: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

They’ve also opted for gender-neutral terms, where possible. “Mothers and fathers” has become “parents” and the “Cloud-Men” of “James and the Giant Peach” are now “Cloud-People.”

Link to the rest at Business Insider

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Our 2022 Facts and Figures compilation of children’s and YA bestsellers includes a wide variety of titles, dominated by ever-expanding illustrated and graphic novel series and their spinoffs, YA movie tie-ins and sequels, and time-tested picture books. Our lists are based on print unit sales at outlets that report to NPD Bookscan, which tracks approximately 85% of the print market. Here we compile the books that sold more than 100,000 copies in four categories: Hardcover Frontlist, Paperback Frontlist, Hardcover Backlist, and Paperback Backlist.

Last year’s overall top-selling book for children was Diper Överlöde, book 17 in Jeff Kinney’s hugely popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which sold more than 800,000 copies in hardcover. The middle grade series and its spinoff, Awesome Friendly Kid, had a strong showing across multiple categories.

The hardcover frontlist list features heavy-hitter Dav Pilkey in the #2 slot, with Cat Kid Comic Club: On Purpose, the third installment in a graphic novel series starring Dog Man character Li’l Petey. Pilkey also ranks high in that category with book four in his Cat Kid Comic Club series, Collaborations, and the color edition of the 12th Captain Underpants book. Despite continued controversy, J.K. Rowling appears at #3 with the newly illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And reflecting the popularity of movie tie-ins and crossovers is Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas by Shea Ernshaw, based on the 1993 film.

At the top of the paperback frontlist is The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han. Her contemporary YA romance series has seen renewed popularity with the June 2022 release of the TV adaptation on Amazon Prime. And the sequel to British writer Holly Jackson’s bestselling teen thriller A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder nabs the third slot. Jackson is scheduled to publish a prequel, Kill Joy on February 28, followed by her first standalone novel, Five Survive, in November.

For hardcover backlist, the late Eric Carle once again takes the lead in the category with sales for The Very Hungry Caterpillar totaling more than 700,000. Perennial picture book favorites Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and Goodnight Moon also had their usual strong sales.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Women Writers, Women’s Books:

Abi Behe, a 13-year-old Londoner has agreed a book deal with UK publisher Markosia for her graphic novels Christiania and Charlie Dirtbags.  Co-created with comic artists Taka, Thomas Muzzell and Thomas John, both books will come out in 2023.

Released this spring, Christiania is set in Freetown – Copenhagen’s crown jewel of artist expression – and centres on social media’s disruptive impact on a defiant Danish teenage girl.  After her parents are forced out of the community, a Christiania is left to raise herself and thrives despite excessive peer pressure – until a close connection seeking online fame begins aggressively targeting her.

“When I thought about making the female character, I wanted her to have experiences similar to girls my age,” says writer Abi Behe. “I hope people can relate to her because I sometimes feel how she feels in the story.”

In the tradition of noir Danish comics portraying idealistic societies with a darker, dysfunctional underworlds, the lead character is a personification of Freetown – an energetic community resisting mainstream superficiality whilst struggling to deal with crime within its boundaries.

“Christiania the girl represents what the real place is all about,” says Behe. “She has gone through all sorts of problems over the years and survived. But then a social media villain tries to destroy Christiania’s real spirit.”

The book’s artist Taka created wordless double-page spreads to emulate the vivid multi-character street art created on the walls throughout Freetown – a stark contrast to rapid-fire content streams flowing in the dark digital world it seeks to expose.

“We wanted to make big two-page scenes without text so readers could soak up each picture and calmly pick up all the meaning,” says Abi. “This is completely different to reading lots of social media messages or news feeds on our phone.”

Both of Behe’s books are set in the world of Contraband, an exploding dark web app attracting people jaded with state censorship, sponsored spam and cancel-culture on mainstream social media. Contraband becomes a criminal digital underground where profit hungry mobs prowl city streets filming radical events to satisfy society’s insatiable demand for sensational content.  But when activists hack the app giving control to any influencer with the most followers, chaos ensues as people everywhere go to any lengths to get the money and fame of being Contraband #1.

Link to the rest at Women Writers, Women’s Books

PG says this sounds like more difficult situations than he would have enjoyed when he was 13. He also wonders if the target audience for these books includes children.

From Electric Lit:

Dear Sugar Plum Fairy, Snow King and Queen, Dewdrop Fairy, Dewdrops, Turkish Twirlers, Mother Ginger, Mother Ginger’s Bébés, Dancing Flowers, Spanish Dancers, Arabian Dancers, Chinese Dancers, Soldiers, Dolls, Rats, Producers, Nutcracker Stans, and beloved Mice:

I’m Angelina Jeanette Mouseling from Chipping Cheddar, UK, born in 1983. Better known as Angelina Ballerina, I’ve danced ballet my whole life. My life story has been made into an award winning set of childrens’ books and TV series. I have a nut to crack with The Nutcracker Ballet.

I’m a mouse. The Nutcracker has always been set against mice. Why? I have no idea. Without us there’s no conflict, no tension, and yet all anyone ever talks about is Clara and the Prince. 

The plot itself is completely unbelievable. In Act One the mice attack the Nutcracker (who turns into a Prince???) for absolutely no reason. I’ve never seen a mouse attack a human in my entire life, let alone attempt to eat royalty. Are you aware of our diminutive size? 

Once the mice are defeated, we’re never seen, or heard from, again. There isn’t a single mouse in the entire second half of the ballet. Whatever… 

Then there’s the tiny problem of typecasting. At first I set my sights on landing the part of Clara, but after years without a callback, I moved on. I thought MAYBE the Sugar Plum Fairy was within reach. But no, I kept getting feedback that I was too little. 

And it’s not just me! Do you know how many of my mouse friends have worked their whole lives, climbing up the ranks through the corps de ballet, only to be cast as Mouse #3 over and over again? 

I’ve advocated for mice in starring roles throughout my career with no success outside of productions for mice by mice. For example my best friend Alice Nimbletoes, the talented gymnast, has never been a lead for a human audience. My rivals, the twins Priscilla and Penelope Pinkpaws, despite being Miss Lilly’s favorites, haven’t made it into leading roles either. Alice is a mouse of color, and the Pinkpaws twins aren’t always the nicest but still, none of us have ever been able to cross over. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From Forbes:

Generative AI, which is known for churning out fantastical art based on text prompts, is now sneaking into one of the most sacred bonding experiences for parents and children: bedtime storytelling.

Amazon is hopping into the generative AI craze with a new Alexa feature that creates short, five-scene stories for kids based on a few prompts. Called ‘Create With Alexa,’ the feature lets children and parents select from given themes like underwater, enchanted forest and space exploration and pick a character, a descriptive word and a color. Then, they sit back and wait as the AI comes up with different stories, visuals, audio dialogues and background music.

With Amazon hopping aboard the generative AI craze, some experts say that the company has created safeguards to ensure that the technology isn’t spouting anything inappropriate for young ears, and Create With Alexa could help foster more shared experiences for children and parents. But AI researchers also warn that stories made with generative AI could mystify children’s understanding of AI’s capabilities and intelligence.

The feature, which is available on Echo Show devices, relies on generative AI, algorithms that use existing content to create new content. Specifically, it implements language models, which ingest large amounts of text to learn how to create sentences similar to how people talk. The algorithm that powers Create With Alexa is trained on a database of commercially available visuals as well as Amazon’s own proprietary content.

Eshan Bhatnagar, head of product for Alexa AI at Amazon, says that Create With Alexa was designed with safety in mind. The technology has three safeguards in place, including content filtering, training the AI on a curated dataset that is free of toxic content, and most importantly, setting up a structured and restricted experience. “We wanted to avoid the garbage in garbage out kind of tendency of AI,” says Bhatnagar, referencing the likelihood of AI to render improper content based on the type of inputs fed into it. “We are being cautious, and conservative in our approach to how we want to expose some of the generative capabilities to our customers.”

Stefania Druga, a researcher on creative AI at the University of Washington, says Amazon’s decision to build Alexa’s new storytelling feature by structuring it around a few input prompts that ask users to select from a given set of templates can help make generative AI safer for kids. “I think this approach of providing curated templates, and really trying to curate the experience and control the types of generations that can be entered into the system is very promising,” Druga told Forbes.

But these safeguards can’t fully protect kids from the influence of intelligent computer systems like Alexa. Druga found in her research paper “Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?” Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction” that interacting with voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home can influence how children understand the intelligence of computers. She says Create With Alexa could mystify the abilities of AI for children, influencing their judgments about how intelligent the computer actually is and whether it’s a trustworthy source.

“What I’ve seen in my research is that the kids don’t even know how to read and write when they start interacting with a voice assistant. And if that’s their first introduction into searching anything on the web, that really colors their experience on how they process information,” Druga says. “Because if it’s spoken to them with a nice voice as a human would talk, they don’t really see that this is just like the first result from a search on the web, then it’s harder to develop this critical sense of whether they should trust this or not.”

Link to the rest at Forbes

From Book Riot:

One of the great joys of my young life was reading books pitched to older children. Graduating from picture books to chapter books with pictures, then chapter books, then longer and longer books was a big deal to me. For kids’ books in the U.S., you can usually find an age range somewhere on the flap or back cover of a book. Readers and people acquiring books for readers occasionally use this as a guide for getting books for appropriate ages. In recent years, certain groups have demanded a more robust rating system for books, similar to the MPAA rating system for movies. However, there are many reasons why books should not have content ratings like movies.

The general idea behind a “rating” system for kids’ books makes sense to me. The widespread availability of the Internet means that kids have access to some of the worst information ever documented with just a few keystrokes. Technology companies attempt to keep up with this freedom by providing methods of blocking content that could be upsetting or out-of-age-range for young children. The problem with books is that there’s no way to automatically censor content in books unless you ban them, rip out specific pages, or cross out certain words with a permanent marker.

Since books are longer and more involved than movies, they’re trickier to pin down with exact content ratings. Including age ranges can sort of help, but they don’t tell you much about the content. A 10 year old is also unlikely to have the exact same experiences or sensitivities as a 10 year old from a different country, or even one from a different neighborhood.

. . . .

Jon Lewis, author of Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry, argues that the ratings are subjective by design. We can see what he means in how certain movies are declared to be far more “adult” than others.

. . . .

Parents don’t even seem to like the MPAA rating system all that much, criticizing it for desensitizing children to violence. So what’s the argument for a rating system for books?

The idea is that kids should not have access to stories that could upset them or expose them to difficult topics. The rating system outlined on Book Cave uses seven categories (crude humor/language, profanity, drug and alcohol use, kissing, nudity, sex and intimacy, and violence and horror), and then rates each category on a scale from All Ages to Adult+. The book is then weighted for a final rating. Common Sense Media gives detailed advice about how to assess various aspects of books and how to choose them for children, and promises to provide detailed reviews to help parents, guardians, and other stakeholders make decisions.

. . . .

Age ranges and reading levels are also very hit-or-miss. Reading levels were introduced in schools to make sure students were keeping up with reading demands, so there were lots of numbers introduced to explain these levels. The important part of reading levels is that children should be able to ingest and understand the majority of the book they’re reading so they don’t get discouraged. However, kids should challenge themselves with books theoretically outside of their level so they don’t get bored.

If reading levels are determined by word difficulty alone, that can also make books look less complex than they are. Age ranges and reading levels are somewhat necessary for educators to build curricula, but kids should always be allowed to seek books outside of their “level” or assigned classroom work. I’m an advocate of the method “bring kid to library and let them explore for three hours,” as my caretakers did for me.

There are problems with rating systems that use categories to determine appropriateness as well. A book might not have violence in it explicitly, but it could have imagery that gives your child a nightmare. We can’t determine how kids will react to reading in general, so over-arching rules and categorical rating systems are limited.

Rating systems that determine how “adult” a book is also impose a certain kind of life experience on childhood. They present a monolithic idea of maturity: a child can only read about violent content when they’re of the age to be familiar with it. There are children in the world who are familiar with curse words, or have experience with violent or upsetting events. “Milestones” in childhood are impossible to pinpoint because people’s life experiences are so wildly different.

Reading about difficult topics, whether or not children have experienced them, can be a good way to process complex emotions. It’s also an important way for children to develop language and understanding around “inappropriate” topics.

. . . .

At the surface, none of this sounds necessarily bad. Parents obviously want kids to read, but they don’t want kids diving into books with intense horror that will scare a 7 year old or overt descriptions of sex before a parent has had ‘The Talk’ with their kid.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

PG notes that parents are not the only people who give or choose books for children.

Schools, public and private, also give/choose books for children. Ditto for libraries.

A ratings system doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful for people who choose books for children to read.

Given the nature of a relatively small portion of books which parents are likely to find objectionable, PG doesn’t mind terribly that a ratings system might err on the side of excluding books that only a small portion of the children’s families would likely find objectionable.

A single book is not the only way a child can learn about something the child or family might regard as objectionable. There are zillions of books available on all manner of topics, presenting them in a wide variety of ways.

As a final observation, PG notes that opinion pieces that claim it’s important for children know about this or that at a particular age are generalizing about children in a manner that assumes that all children of a certain age are ready to understand this or that fact of life. They also often assume that getting such information with a certain degree of specificity is important when a more general discussion might provide some or all children with the information they need to know and assuming they can extrapolate from the general to the specific without having the specific laid out in great detail.

PG’s experience growing up on ranches and farms with livestock of various sizes and shapes exposed him to some universal elements of mammalian interaction between the female and male of a given species gave him the general idea concerning male/female reproduction cause and effect among mammals of other types.

He expects that any child growing up in a neighborhood with more than one or two dogs might have the same general type of experience from time to time without the specificity provided in a book describing such details between human males and females of different ages.

But, as usual, PG could be completely wrong about this whole subject.

During his internet checking for the post that appeared online just before this one, PG was researching a bit about Scholastic and stumbled onto something he thought would be of interest to visitors to TPV. This story appeared in October, 2021.

From The New York Times:

When her phone buzzed on June 6, Iole Lucchese was still absorbing a shock that had come the day before. Her longtime boss, M. Richard Robinson Jr., the chairman and chief executive of the Scholastic publishing company, had died suddenly while taking a walk with one of his sons and his former wife on Martha’s Vineyard.

Now, Scholastic’s general counsel, Andrew Hedden, was on the phone, delivering a second surprise.

He had called to inform her that Mr. Robinson, 84 — who turned his father’s book and magazine business into the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the world, known for thousands of beloved series, including Clifford the Big Red Dog, Hunger Games and Harry Potter — had left Ms. Lucchese 53.8 percent of Scholastic’s Class A stock. The company where she had worked for 30 years, rising from a junior employee in the Canadian market to one of its top executives, was now a company she controlled.

“It was overwhelming,” Ms. Lucchese said in an interview at Scholastic’s headquarters in SoHo, water towers punctuating the cityscape behind her.

Being handed control of the company, which is valued at $1.2 billion, has made Ms. Lucchese, 55, one of the most powerful women in book publishing, and the stock provides her — the daughter of a construction worker and a homemaker — with significant wealth. The gift also shifts the business, which had been passed from father to son, to a person outside the family and puts Scholastic in an extremely unusual position for a public company: adapting to a succession plan many key players did not know was coming.

In his will, Mr. Robinson described Ms. Lucchese (her name is pronounced YO-lay lew-KAY-zee) as “my partner and closest friend.” But an article in The Wall Street Journal described them as “longtime romantic partners.” Six former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were reluctant to cause further embarrassment to Mr. Robinson’s sons, confirmed to The New York Times that the romantic relationship between Ms. Lucchese and Mr. Robinson had been well known among many Scholastic employees.

“We were great business partners and close friends,” said Ms. Lucchese, a senior executive responsible for strategy and the company’s entertainment division.

She declined to address The Journal’s claim that she and Mr. Robinson had been involved in a relationship, which the employees believe ended a few years before his death.

This was Ms. Lucchese’s first interview with the news media since the death of Mr. Robinson, whom everyone called Dick. She was joined at a round conference table by Peter Warwick, the company’s new chief executive, and flanked by two publicists, one from Scholastic and another from the public relations firm Edelman.

“Dick understood that I shared his passion for Scholastic, and what this company means to the teachers we serve, to the children we serve, to everyone,” Ms. Lucchese said of his decision to leave his Class A shares to her. “He trusted me with that legacy, and I think it’s because we worked together and he knew that we were aligned.”

That bequest bypassed his two sons, John Benham Robinson, 34, known as Ben, and Maurice Robinson, 25, known as Reece. Mr. Robinson’s sons declined to comment for this article.

. . . .

The publisher’s offices are in a warehouse-style building with exposed bricks, subway tiles and a giant sculpture of Captain Underpants busting through the lobby wall. On the day of the interview, the offices sat mostly empty as many employees continued to work from home because of the pandemic. Any silences in the conversation hung heavily in the air.

Sometimes confining herself to one-word answers, Ms. Lucchese discussed her career and the unusual situation of being both a longtime senior executive and now also the chairwoman. A stack of Harry Potter books kept watch from a large wooden bookshelf over Ms. Lucchese’s left shoulder.

“He’s the boss,” she said, motioning to Mr. Warwick, who, as chief executive, in one sense outranks her.

“But I do report to the board,” he answered.

An Envelope in a Safe

“Scholastic announces the untimely death of its chairman and CEO M. Richard (Dick) Robinson, Jr.,” a company news release declared the day after Mr. Robinson died. It emphasized that his passing had been unexpected and sudden, even though he was 84 years old.

About six weeks later, Ms. Lucchese’s new position as chairwoman was made public, with the company including that update midway through a news release titled “Peter Warwick Named Chief Executive Officer of Scholastic Corporation.”

Scholastic did not seek publicity for its new chair, the first woman and the first person outside the Robinson family to hold the position in decades. A few days after the news of the personal complexity around the succession had broken in The Journal, the company, known for its stable of beloved childhood classics, became an object of tabloid interest — “How ‘chameleon’ Iole Lucchese won $1.2B Scholastic empire,” read one New York Post headline.

When a reporter for The New York Times emailed Scholastic in August requesting an interview with Ms. Lucchese, Ira Gorsky, executive vice president at Edelman, the public relations company, called to inquire about whether Ms. Lucchese would be asked about “the alleged affair,” saying, “You can see how this is offensive, how the allegations implied that she has not gotten to her position because of merit.”

Mr. Gorsky said that as “a ground rule for giving an interview,” the Times reporter could not ask Ms. Lucchese about a personal relationship with Mr. Robinson. When the reporter declined to agree to such limitations, Mr. Gorsky responded: “Then we’re done.”

Ms. Lucchese did eventually agree to be interviewed, and no one representing her asked again for restrictions on topics or questions. Aside from an hourlong conversation with Ms. Lucchese and Mr. Warwick, preceded by a tour of the company’s archive led by a librarian, Scholastic declined to make any other employee available.

Her supporters say that as a 30-year veteran and a longtime senior executive of the company, she represents continuity and is qualified to lead it. Any skeptical reaction to Mr. Robinson’s choice of Ms. Lucchese is “laced with sexism,” said Erik Feig, the founder of Picturestart, a media financing and production company that Scholastic invested in and where Ms. Lucchese is a board member.

“She understands every brick of the literal and metaphorical building of the company,” Mr. Feig said.

Wall Street does not know her as well as some players in Hollywood do. Scholastic’s largest investor, after the Robinson family, was not aware of Mr. Robinson’s succession plan. “On a number of occasions, I asked Dick,” said David Wallack, a portfolio manager for T. Rowe Price, the Baltimore-based investment company, which holds more than 18 percent of the company’s common stock.

“He would tell me, ‘When I die, there is a safe, and there is an envelope in the safe, and the board of directors will open the safe and see what my wishes were,’” said Mr. Wallack, who was in regular touch with Mr. Robinson for 20 years. “I thought it was hyperbole.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times

(Sorry if you hit a paywall. PG isn’t a subscriber to the NYT digital edition, but somehow managed to slip past the NYT paywall this one time. Sorry, but he doesn’t know what magic formula got him there.)

From Publishing Perspectives:

Among the two days of B2B sessions programmed for the inaugural season of our Publishing Perspectives Forum at Frankfurter Buchmesse, an October 20 discussion called “What Young Readers Need Today: Children’s Publishing CEOs in Conversation” drew a strong audience of trade visitors and exhibitors.

Frankfurt president and CEO Juergen Boos led the wide-ranging conversation with Scholastic president and CEO Peter Warwick and Ravensburger CEO Clemens Maier.

Scholastic, based in the States but with deep international-market penetration, is about a century old and is widely recognized as the largest publisher in the world of its kind. Ravensburger was founded in 1883 and, at 139 years old remains focused on a range of products, not just on books, its first product actually having been a wood chip basket sold in 1884.

“Where I think we’re united and a little bit difference from many publishers,” Ravensburger’s Maier said early in the discussion, “is that [we’ve each] actually built a brand, a company brand, a recognizable brand” which may, in fact, be understood differently according to which consumer you ask about it.

“‘The parents know ‘Ravensburger,’” he pointed out, while youngsters for whom those parents are buying educational content may be more familiar with one of the company’s brands such as ThinkFun or Brio.

Warwick pointed out that there’s a parallel in the brand discussion for major companies like Scholastic and Ravensburger and the author-illustrator relationship.

“In illustrated children’s books,” he said, “it’s always a marriage” between the work of the author and the illustrator,” although he agreed with Boos that by the time a reader may be getting into the YA range of the market, there’s a good chance that she or he will be starting to recognize authors’ names, perhaps as readily as a favorite illustrator.

This creates a kind of shifting market dynamic for young readers’ work, and especially for major houses like Scholastic and Ravensburger.

“We always try to analyze as much as we possibly can,” Warwick said, “to understand exactly who is the customer: is it parents, is it the teachers, is it the child? In different circumstances, it can be it can be all of them.”

This question of market analysis and consumer insight prompted Maier to talk about “huge advances in technology and artificial intelligence that we can use in our industry, I think it’s super-exciting.

“We’re looking at things like text-to-image,” he said, “where through simple sentences, you can create images, it’s quite fascinating.”

While “the human hand is still very, very important, we see technology enabling us in many respects, with all the data analysis” that goes into good marketing by taking into account consumer reaction to products.

“Even a company of our size has to be pretty technologically savvy at this point,” Maier said.

And that, as Warwick had pointed out, is itself complicated in the children’s sector by the fact that the buyer and the reader frequently aren’t the same person. Just how text and image may affect the “consumer” can vary according to who that consumer is.

. . . .

“We do a very significant part of our business actually on the school premises,” he said. “We weren’t able to operate [Scholastic’s] book fairs. And we weren’t able to operate our book clubs. There was nobody around for quite a few months to significantly buy educational books, either. Those, our trade books, and what we sell internationally,” Warwick said, “are the core of our business.

“So the timing of the pandemic was pretty serious,” he told Boos. “What happened was that instead of being able to do commerce, as it were, on the school premises, we did a lot more business with the booksellers and the trade, and a lot more business with direct-to-parents—being able to deliver bookshop choices to parents rather than schools. It’s now reverted back to pretty much where it was before, which is to say 85-percent book fairs,” he said—”and the fairs’ revenue is higher than before the pandemic, so that’s very satisfactory.”

On the other hand, he said, “Our trade sales have cooled a little because those books the parents might have [bought] by going to a bookstore, the kids are now getting through the book fair. So we’ve seen the switch and the switch-back.”

Warwick added that the supply-chain effects had been substantial for Scholastic, as well. Having seen a lot of books come in later than expected a year ago, “We wanted to make sure that [now] we have everything. That’s been a change from last year to this year, a fundamental change in the way our business has been organized.”

. . . .

“With families staying at home,” Maier said, “there was a lot of time to play and a demand for those products, semi-educational products. A good chunk of our business is puzzles.

A lot of people” who might not normally advertise their fondness for puzzles “now started puzzling and were very vocal about it. We found ourselves on the front pages of American newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. I think it was the Australian prime minister who said that puzzles are ‘a product of national need’ and that you were allowed to leave the house for that.

“In that sense, COVID was kind to us. Obviously that’s changing now. Some of that extra time is going away and we do feel supply-chain challenges that many people fear. I get the sense our whole modern global supply chain has been built for 2-, 3-, 4-percent swings, not for the 20-percent swings we’ve been seeing over the last couple of years.”

Warwick concurred with Maier on this: “The whole basis of the supply chain for many years was ‘just in time.’ And it’s now become ‘just out of time,’ really because if you’re working on a just-in-time basis, that will really have to change.”

. . . .

Maier made a aside that in Ravensburger’s GraviTrax interactive construction apps, “Lots of people play it, but what we don’t do—or very rarely do—is try to mix the product experience.

“So when the issue was new, everybody was saying, ‘Wow, that is so cool.’” Some elements of the app’s operation could make it appear that an iPhone was broken, although this was simply a messaging effect built into the media.

“What we all realized, Maier said, “was that joining the experience of digital and physical in-app is not a great idea. Going with the same brand into both worlds we do think is a great idea. And then of course there’s exceptions to that because there’s some things where the screen for learning, as a supplement makes a ton of sense.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Perhaps it’s just PG’s mood today, but none of the participants in this discussion sounded particularly intelligent, insightful or innovative.

Exhibit A: “The whole basis of the supply chain for many years was ‘just in time.’ And it’s now become ‘just out of time,’ really because if you’re working on a just-in-time basis, that will really have to change.”

Duh! Covid shutdowns disrupted manufacturing and shipping for virtually all major industries all over the world, a fact which most intelligent business executives took on board months ago.

Exhibit A is the equivalent of saying, “Trees used for printed books take too long to grow.”

Exhibit B: “In illustrated children’s books,” he said, “it’s always a marriage” between the work of the author and the illustrator.”

Oh, really? It takes an author and an illustrator to created an illustrated book? Who would have thunk that?

Presumably, Publishing Perspectives picked the highlights of the statements of these corporate drones to include in its article summarizing what was likely at least a one-hour session.

There was one key indicator Publishing Perspectives didn’t include in its reporting — How many audience members walked out during the session to look for something that was less tedious and more interesting.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

In 2014’s The Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus, Rick Riordan wrapped up the tales of Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood, allowing them to concentrate on the future rather than saving the world. Save for the occasional cameo, since then the three have yielded space to other protagonists, such as god-turned-mortal Apollo. However, in September 2023, Riordan will reunite his iconic trio for another grand adventure, when they’re called upon to retrieve a missing artifact.

Percy Jackson and the Chalice of the Gods started off as a way to entice Hollywood studios into supporting the rebooted Percy Jackson TV adaptation for Disney+. “What if I sweetened the deal,” Riordan said he pondered, “by giving the readers something they’ve been wanting for the last decade, a classic Percy Jackson novel from his point of view, featuring Percy, Annabeth, and Grover, just like the original five books? It would be the first time since The Last Olympian in 2009 that we had an honest-to-goodness Percy Jackson novel.” (The Heroes of Olympus series, which initially focused upon Roman demi-god Jason Grace, expanded the cast and was told from multiple points of view.)

“I knew we basically had a year to play with during Percy’s senior year in high school, where nothing had been sketched out, no canon described,” Riordan said. “All we know is he’s in school in New York. So what would happen to him? Of course, he’s getting ready for college. And I’ve been through that with my two boys, and that means recommendation letters. And to get into New Rome University, you need recommendation letters from the gods, and they don’t give those out for free. So Percy has to do quests—not to save the world this time, but just to get into college.”

But the television deal with Disney took off and the pitch proved unnecessary after all, so Riordan shelved the idea while working on other projects. When Disney asked Riordan if he had anything they could publish to support the show, he said, “I have these ideas that I came up with two years ago. Why don’t we give the fans a treat?”

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From We are Teachers:

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”

Charlotte’s Web

“In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf.”

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

“On Thursday, when Imogene woke up, she found she had grown antlers.”

Imogene’s Antlers

“In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls, in two straight lines.”

Madeline

“There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.”

Holes

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Link to the rest at We are Teachers

From Electric Lit:

Before my online life orbited around Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, my imaginative play centered on being Mary-Kate and Ashley. The twins were girls like me, except cuter and blonde. A bit older. Certainly smaller, but still, larger than life. They were influencers before the advent of social media. Their empire was built upon their ability to successfully monetize the self. 

 “Do you want to be Mary-Kate or Ashley?” I’d ask my neighbor, Megan, as we waded through the creek by her house. Megan always wanted to be Mary-Kate. That’s why I’d given her a choice. 

Mary-Kate was marketed as sporty and adventurous. Ashley was stylish and demure. Who you chose aligned with the girl you hoped to be – and for me, that was the most feminine girl, the most perfect of girls, everything I’d been told a girl should be. 

We divvied up the twins and mimicked plot lines from their direct-to-video mystery and You’re Invited! series, pretending to solve crimes in our neighborhood cul-de-sac, planning occasion-less parties in the garden. Everything the twins marketed was rooted in a reality that could theoretically be replicated – a reality more exciting and beautiful than the mundane life of a rural West Virginia girl.

By the time the Olsens were in elementary school, their manager, Robert Thorne, began the work that would lead to their jaw dropping fortune. No longer just child actresses, they became a brand. Their faces appeared all over Walmart, one of the only places to shop in our small town. As my mom filled up her grocery cart, I strolled the dimly lit makeup aisles where I spotted the Mary-Kate and Ashley line: jelly lip glosses and creamy eye shadows in a variety of catching colors. Their makeup boasted no specific cosmetic improvement. Not longer lashes or brighter skin or stronger nails. The only brag was the association.

I walked to the middle of the store, to their girls’ clothing line targeted to tweens, those in-between childhood and adolescence. There, I picked out one of their tank tops to purchase with my allowance money, a flimsy piece of fabric in aquamarine, its back a maze of strings. 

“I don’t know,” my mom said as I held the shirt up in the freezer section of the grocery store, harsh lighting barely illuminating the small rhinestones sewn into the fabric for embellishment. “You wouldn’t be able to wear a bra with that.” 

“I don’t need a bra,” I argued, though my mother and I both knew that I certainly did. I could tell she was about to say this, though she stopped herself, perhaps for fear that my response to being punished for breasts would be continued attempts to starve them away. 

“You can only wear it around the house,” she said.

“In the neighborhood?” 

“I don’t know. Certainly not out.”

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From The New Yorker:

You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them?

This was the late eighties in Los Angeles. You binged on these books, pulling tattered sun-bleached copies from your bookshelf: four, five, six in the course of a single afternoon. All over the country, all over the world, other kids were pulling these books from their bookshelves, too. The series has sold more than two hundred and seventy million copies since its launch, in 1979. It’s the fourth-best-selling children’s-book series of all time. Its popularity peaked in the eighties, but the franchise still sells about a million books a year.

In “The Cave of Time,” the first book in the series, you discover a time-travelling cave whose tunnels carry you to Colonial Massachusetts, where you become a soap-maker’s apprentice; or to the Titanic, where your attempts to warn the captain are futile; or even to a version of the year 2022 that does not look much like our version of 2022 (more bike trails). The stated desire of your character (to return to your own time) is at odds with the actual desire of a reader (to have as many adventures as possible). You want to die in the jaws of a T. rex, or change the course of history by eating a sandwich. The warning at the beginning of the book tells you, “Remember—you cannot go back!” But of course you can go back, and you will. After the first few books, the warnings stop saying “You cannot go back!” They understand that going back is the point—not the making but the re-making of choices, the revocability of it all. In childhood, you get to take things back. It’s a small compensation for having very little power in the first place.

Choose books invited kids to exercise some agency, as they rattled around in these cages of limited possibility: millions of seven-year-olds who would someday become thirty-five-year-olds remembering with an aching nostalgia this early sense of freedom; this faith that, after every death, there would always be a do-over.

TWO DADS

The story of Choose Your Own Adventure is largely the tale of two men: Edward Packard, a lawyer who came up with the concept while telling bedtime stories to his two daughters (who sometimes wanted the protagonist to do different things), and R. A. (Ray) Montgomery, an independent publisher who put out Packard’s first book, in 1976, after all the big houses had rejected it. Each of them eventually went on to write nearly sixty titles in the series. During the next three decades, Packard and Montgomery (who died in 2014) weathered an evolving, sometimes fractious relationship. Each, at various points, pursued publishing ventures without the other. But together they were responsible for many of the most beloved titles in the series: Packard’s “The Cave of Time,” “Your Code Name Is Jonah,” “Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?,” and “The Mystery of Chimney Rock”; Montgomery’s “Journey Under the Sea,” “The Lost Jewels of Nabooti,” “Mystery of the Maya,” and “Prisoner of the Ant People.”

Both men went through divorces shortly before the series started gaining momentum, and ended up writing many of their books as single fathers. Their children remember helping their fathers invent and flesh out new scenarios: Packard’s daughter Andrea suggested the idea of a time-travelling cave; Montgomery’s sons, Anson and Ramsey, suggested cars (the Saab 900 Turbo, the Lancia Stratos) for “The Race Forever.” Packard paid his children thirty-five cents an hour to read his manuscripts and offer feedback: Which parts were boring? Which choices would kids enjoy? (Andrea, Anson, and Ramsey ended up writing for the franchise, publishing their first Choose books during college.)

Andrea recalls that time with her father felt even more precious after her parents divorced. (They split up when she was seven.) He would take her on weekend outings that emphasized experiment and tactile experience—encountering the world in concrete, physical ways—and Andrea sees the Choose books as another manifestation of this ethos: a way of encouraging kids to experience the world through exploration and curiosity. Andrea can still remember looking at her father’s diagrams for the books: the forking branches spidering across taped-together paper charts. To her, “those charts felt like houses of possibility.”

. . . .

THE STORYTELLER

When his daughters were young, Packard told them bedtime stories about a boy named Pete, a literary alter ego of Andrea’s. (Pete was also the name of a friend she had a crush on, but she thinks the character’s creation had more to do with her suspicion that boys had more freedom in the world.) At key junctures in the story, Packard would ask his daughters what they thought Pete should do next, and when they gave different answers he’d play out both possibilities. Packard remembers this innovation as a function of necessity—“If I’d been a better storyteller, we never would have gotten the form. . . . I’d get stumped, and ask the girls what should happen next”—but Andrea recalls it as an instance of his generosity. He wanted to give each girl her own ending, just as he was always meticulously fair in his distribution of snacks, compliments, and attention.

Andrea remembers bedtime stories with her dad as sacred—this was the time the kids got to be with him, after his long days working at a law firm in Manhattan and his lengthy train commutes back to their home, in suburban Connecticut. Eventually, Packard began using these commutes to turn his bedtime stories into his first book, “Sugarcane Island,” a story full of branching paths recounting Pete’s adventures on a remote island. Working on the manuscript offered Packard an escape from a law career he found largely unsatisfying. In 1969, Packard signed a contract with an agent, who submitted “Sugarcane Island” to various New York publishers and accumulated a stack of rejections. One editor thought it was more of a game than a book. Another said, “It’s hard enough to get children to read, and you’re just making it harder, with all these choices.”

THE SCENARIO BUILDER

On a Vermont ski vacation in 1975, years after getting rejected by every editor who read “Sugarcane Island,” Packard stumbled across a magazine article about a small publisher called Vermont Crossroads, run by a husband-and-wife team: Ray Montgomery and Constance Cappel. They were looking for inventive children’s literature. When he sent them “Sugarcane Island,” they were immediately excited by the concept. One of Montgomery’s jobs had been consulting as a scenario builder for the Peace Corps and for Con Edison, writing elaborate second-person roles for participants: “You are a construction worker in your mid-thirties. . . . Oil shortages worry you, but you believe a lot of it is bluff.” Packard’s book reminded him of those scenarios: their immersive perspectives, decision junctures, and forking paths.

Despite the couple’s enthusiasm, Vermont Crossroads didn’t have many resources to devote to promotion. Packard had to pitch in to help with the publishing costs. Montgomery Xeroxed sixty copies and gave them to a local teacher to pass out to her students as a kind of juvenile focus group. Asked if they found the book interesting, fifty-nine said yes—and the one who called it “boring” reported having read it nine times. When asked if they would give the book as a gift, only four students said no (one of whom explained, “I’d keep it”). Another student said, “In other books if you’re in a jungle and a snake was next to you, you would have to go away or stay still but in this book you can do both.”

“Sugarcane Island” went on to become one of Vermont Crossroads’s most successful books, selling more than five thousand copies, but both Packard and Montgomery believed that the idea had the potential to break out on a much larger scale. That’s when things got a bit messy, both personally and professionally. Montgomery and his wife separated (as Packard tells it, “she got the house, he got ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ ”); and both men tried (separately) to take the Choose Your Own Adventure concept to larger publishers. First, Packard signed a deal with J. B. Lippincott & Co., an imprint of Harper, and published two Choose books. His pitch for a third was rejected. Packard says that Montgomery, “miffed” that Packard had left Vermont Crossroads, approached Bantam, then part of Bertelsmann, with the concept on his own. Montgomery got a contract for six books. As Packard tells it, Bantam “wouldn’t sign the deal” without Packard’s involvement; as Montgomery’s widow, Shannon Gilligan, tells it, Montgomery’s sense of fairness, as well as a feeling that six books in a year was too much for one writer, inspired him to get Packard involved. However it happened, they eventually split the deal.

Andrea helped her father come up with the idea for “The Cave of Time” during a road trip. They were in his orange Volkswagen Squareback—with a stick holding up one window, and no seat belts in the back—going to see his mother on the North Fork of Long Island. Packard told his daughters and their younger brother that he had a contract with Bantam and he needed ideas. Andrea had recently gone spelunking at summer camp, crawling into a small cave beneath the main cave, farther than anyone else, and felt torn between exploring more—had anyone ever seen these tunnels?—and returning to safety. When she suggested the idea to her father—a cave whose deepest tunnels transported you through time—he said, “Great idea! Get started!,” and handed her a yellow composition pad. “The Cave of Time” credits Andrea with “concept, title, and editorial assistance,” and she has always received a percentage of the royalties.

At Bantam, Choose Your Own Adventure finally found the huge readership its creators always believed it could entice. A 1981 feature in the Times described a fourth-grade classroom with seven students all making different choices in “The Cave of Time.” Soon afterward, Packard was interviewed by Bryant Gumbel on the “Today” show. (He’d been hoping for Jane Pauley, whom he had a crush on.) At some point in the early eighties, Bantam decided that it wanted twelve books a year, so it got six from Packard and six from Montgomery.

The Choose franchise hit a generational sweet spot, alongside the rise of Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. Back then, it was these text-based experiences which could most powerfully deliver the possibilities of interactive narrative.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

From The Wall Street Journal:

Once upon a time, fairy tales were the rage in fashionable Paris. At literary salons and at the court of Louis XIV, ladies and gentlemen beguiled one another with fantastical tales of talking animals and monster-husbands; of djinns and sorcerers; of sleeping beauties and ravenous ogres. Many tales had their origins in the nscrutable past of oral storytelling, containing narrative elements that in some cases dated back to the Bronze Age and could be traced to no single creator. In time, they began making their way into print—and acquiring authors.

In 1697 the French writer Charles Perrault published the first volume of European fairy tales, “Tales of Mother Goose.” A few years later, Antoine Galland thrilled salon habitués with his translation into French of the Middle Eastern folk tales known variously as “The Thousand and One Nights” and “The Arabian Nights.” These stories, glittering with thrilling detail and told through the framing device of a princess determined to keep her homicidal husband hanging on her words, were a literary sensation.

Who told the stories first? Who knows? As Nicholas Jubber writes in “The Fairy Tellers,” “searching for the roots of fairy tales is a process of entangling oneself in mysteries. Delve into the sources and we can find, every so often, the frayed end of the line, but there are always more knots to untie.” Fiddling about with frayed story-ends and pesky authorial knots is the business of this enthusiastic and enjoyable book, in which Mr. Jubber, a British travel writer, explores the lives and work of seven storytellers who are mostly unknown outside academic circles. The exception is Hans Christian Andersen, the 19th-century Danish fabulist who remains a household name thanks to the enduring popularity of original fairy tales such as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Andersen aside, the general reader is unlikely to have met Mr. Jubber’s other subjects and may be amazed to learn the degree to which these unsung men and women have shaped the fairy-tale canon we enjoy today.

Consider, for instance, “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” sensational tales of wealth and trickery that are perhaps the best-known of all the rich story delights of “The Arabian Nights.” As Mr. Jubber explains, neither tale made an appearance in the first seven volumes of Galland’s translations. The Frenchman was able to add them only after his encounters in 1709 with a Maronite Syrian storyteller who was on a sojourn to Paris. The identity of that long-ago traveler remained obscure—a frayed end, we might say—until 1993, when a Ph.D. student poking through Arabic manuscripts in the Vatican archives happened upon the fellow’s memoirs. The man who brought the world the story of a shiftless youth inveigled by a magician into stealing an enchanted lamp; the storyteller who first told of a bandit chief using the words “open sesame” to enter a treasure cave—this man was a former monastery novice from Aleppo named Abd al-Qari Antoun Youssef Youhenna Dyab. Hanna, as he was known, told 16 stories to Galland, who translated them later into French. “Galland did much to colour in the details,” notes Mr. Jubber, “but it was Hanna who provided the characters, the twists in the tale, the settings and resolution.” In a charming revelation, it transpires that this earliest-known teller of “Aladdin” borrowed ideas for his character’s wonderful palace from what Mr. Jubber calls the “fairy tale seraglio” of Versailles. Thus do fairy tales ever adapt, collecting bits of color and changing shape as they travel through time and language from one person to the next.

We see this process unfurling in the stories told by Mr. Jubber’s other tellers: the Renaissance Italian Giambattista Basile, author of the earliest European versions of “Rapunzel” and “Cinderella”; Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, whose 1740 “Beauty and the Beast” was the first of its kind; Dortchen Wild, the amiable young woman who gave “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Hansel and Gretel” to the Brothers Grimm for their 1812 collection; Ivan Khudiakov, the 19th-century Russian folklorist who amassed fairy tales about princes, fools, the witch Baba Yaga and the magical Firebird; and Somadeva Bhatta, the 11th-century Kashmiri court poet and author of a tremendous, multifarious work known in English as “The Ocean of the Streams of Story.” To bring us into the realms of these men and women,, Mr. Jubber interleaves passages of quirky biography, literary history, personal anecdote and his own retellings of their fairy tales. Rosie Collins, meanwhile, supplies neat little drawings to start off each chapter. The result is a handsome book stuffed with surprise and interest.

. . . .

One of America’s most distinguished experts in fairy tales and folklore is on a reclamation mission of her own with “The Heroine With 1,001 Faces” (published last year but due in paperback in September). In this fluent, genre-spanning work, Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor who specializes in German culture, sets out to illuminate the constellation of heroines that spangle the cultural firmament. In doing so, she purposely offers a complement—and compliment—to Joseph Campbell’s model of male heroism as explored in his 1949 book “The Hero With a Thousand Faces.”

To the task of identifying heroic female qualities (not least, care and compassion), Ms. Tatar brings a virtuosic command of story and character, gliding with impressive, almost too-slippery facility from Greek mythology to Buzzfeed; from Scheherazade to Clara Barton; from Fern in “Charlotte’s Web” to Starr Carter in “The Hate U Give.” Heroes, Ms. Tatar reflects, “embark on quests and journeys that have as their goal more than a return home.” Heroines, by contrast, are “habitually bent on social missions, trying to rescue, restore, or fix things, with words as their only weapons.”

Ms. Tatar admits to having been deeply moved by the #MeToo movement, seeing in its revelations the same tensions between speech and silence (and silencing) that have affected women since antiquity. “Rarely wielding the sword and often deprived of the pen,” she writes, “women have relied on the domestic crafts and their verbal analogues—spinning tales, weaving plots, and telling yarns—to make things right, not just getting even but also securing social justice.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Publishers Weekly:

For nearly two decades, I have been speaking about the ways adult gatekeepers encourage girls to read books about boys but discourage, prevent, or even shame boys from reading about girls. A couple of years ago, a helpful industry professional let me know that gendered reading wasn’t an issue anymore. “We’ve moved past that, you don’t need to keep talking about it.”

I’d heard that before, always from those who live in large coastal cities. I can’t say if those parts of our country have evolved beyond it, but I live in a flyover state, and that very same week, five women had come into my home office one by one to work on a non-publishing project. All were mothers who had at least one son and one daughter, and as copies of my books were in the room, I offered to sign some for their kids as a thank you. Every single one asked me to sign them to their daughter. When I learned their sons were also the target age of the books, I asked if I could sign one for them as well. It was almost comical how identical their reactions were. Uncomfortable. Confused. More than one even spoke those words: “But… it’s a girl book.”

So I gave my spiel: how we assume that boys won’t want to read about girls, but that’s our own bias. How kids don’t look for books based on gender but by genre and interest. How boys should definitely be encouraged to read books about other boys—all kids deserve to see themselves reflected—but that denying boys the opportunity to also read from another point of view is doing them a disservice, because understanding and developing empathy for more than half the human race can only help them as they navigate their lives, and so on and on. I could go on for hours. I promise, I try not to!

I didn’t know if I convinced them, but they did take the books, and weeks later one of the women reported to me—in shocked tones—that her son had read the books and actually liked them!

And this is how the effort goes. We slowly try to change things, one parent, one book, one kid at a time. It feels like the ol’ teaspoon and the ocean, and sometimes I worry that nothing really gets better. When I hear how many people in my own industry don’t think the problem exists at all, that worry dips toward despair.

But I would say most of the gendered reading bias I’ve encountered is not fueled by bad intent. It’s ignorance. Ideologies work their sneaky best when they feel “natural,” as in, “That’s just the way things are.” And our cultural ideology has for so long taught us “girls will read about boys, but boys won’t read about girls” that it feels like truth. That statement is putting an innocuous mask on this foundational belief: girls should (and for their own survival, must) learn to understand boys, but it’s demeaning for boys to understand girls. It reveals that we’ve created a hierarchy out of the binary opposites of male and female, asserting that the masculine is aspirational and the feminine is degrading. And excluding non-binary individuals entirely.

When my husband and I first had the idea for The Princess in Black series, we wanted to write it specifically for the mostly pre-third grade audience, partly because third grade is the age when kids have already absorbed that ideology and it’s so much harder to unpack. But if, from a young age, boys have read and loved books about girls, the ideology will have a harder time infiltrating their brains.

Here is the advice I got from many people at the time: boys are never going to willingly read about a princess. If you want boys to read about a girl, you need to disguise that the book is about a girl.

But that’s the whole point! The book has “Princess” in the title! And a princess on the cover! There is no denying it’s about a girl—and the boys will still read it and like it. That’s an experience their third-grade brain won’t be able to erase. And that will show the naysayers!

Eight years later, I am happy to report that the naysayers have been shown. Alas, they continue saying nay. Especially on Twitter.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Publishers Weekly:

On Mar. 13, 2020, I posted a piece of writing to my small group of friends on Facebook. My response to lockdown during the first anxious stage of a pandemic was a brief prose poem told from the future, describing the choices we’d made in facing the virus. That night, a friend asked if she could repost it. “Sure,” I replied, and that was that.

Or so I thought.

Two mornings later, my husband was scrolling through his Facebook page and asked, “How could this former student of mine be reposting something you wrote?”

I had no idea.

The next day, a friend texted me: “Deepak Chopra just read your poem on his daily video.”

And so it began. During a viral pandemic, my poem went viral. Within a week, my little locked-down life was inundated with hundreds of requests from all over the world. It was chaotic, exhilarating, exhausting, and possibly the greatest learning experience of my life. The blessings outweighed the challenges (though they were many and at times daunting).

Two of those blessings stand out. First, going viral when the world was in lockdown connected me with many other artists seeking collaboration and mutual inspiration in translating our conflicted experiences of this pandemic into art. I spent the first year of the pandemic almost entirely immersed in creative work with composers, musicians, visual artists, dramatists, and choreographers. Many of these artists have become life-changing friends. Others twirled into my life and out again, but their enchantment stays with me.

. . . .

The second blessing has been the realization of my lifelong dream. I was invited to become the writer I’ve always been and only ever wanted to be. An editor working with Tra Publishing contacted me about turning the poem into a children’s picture book, and thus And the People Stayed Home was born. I was not familiar with Tra, but after researching its work I let go of hesitancy, as so many of these viral experiences were inviting me to do, and entered into what has become a gifted collaboration. It has been like stepping into my true self, that space that had always been waiting for me.

I’d been writing poems and stories for children all of my life, but “over the transom” manuscript mailings, seminars, online associations, literary agent queries, and every other way into publishing that I knew of had yielded nothing. For most of my adulthood, the internet and self-publishing didn’t exist. I thought I’d exhausted my options for entryways into traditional publishing.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Jane Friedman:

Many of the adult memoir manuscripts that cross my editorial desk share one issue: They start too early. Usually, about 50 pages too early. The writer spends time establishing the quirky small town/neighborhood they were born in, the family experiences that shaped them, the early realizations that they—or their family—weren’t like everyone else, carefully setting up the clues for later revelations about divorce, addiction, illness or triumph.

The reader needs some of that information, yes, but not all of it. A concrete, well-timed detail can give a lot to readers without spelling it out. For example: I could fill you in on my family history of alcoholism, how it manifested in my grandparents’ daily “cocktail hour,” my own shying away from drinking because I don’t like the taste and I’m scared, what it was like living with a father who was drunk or at least buzzed most of the time—or I could tell you, I have a hard time telling when someone else is drunk. I think they just seem “jolly.” For an adult memoir about an adult experience in my life, and in context, that’s probably enough background.

But what if your childhood is the whole point?

While some adult memoirs successfully cover childhood in depth (notably Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle), there’s a whole new category out there, selling like hotcakes: memoir for young readers. Graphic-novel autofiction like Raina Telgemeier’s Guts and Jerry Craft’s New Kid and Class Act. Memoir in verse like Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again, both winners of the National Book Award and Newberry Honors, and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout, the memoir version of her bestselling novel Speak.

These memoirs fall into Young Adult and Middle Grade, but they don’t shy away from hard subjects. Anxiety. Racism. Immigration. Poverty. Sexual assault. They embrace beautiful writing while dealing with issues their readers experience, in vocabulary their readers can understand and apply to their own lives. Not everything ends happily ever after.

In an adult memoir, childhood is usually a chance for reflection, as in Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened:

By age seven I realized that there was something wrong with me, and that most children didn’t hyperventilate and throw up when asked to leave the house. My mother called me “quirky.” My teachers whispered “neurotic.” But deep down I knew there was a better word for what I was. Doomed.

Lawson takes us into the feelings of the child she was, but she’s processing her experiences through the reactions of the adults around her at that time, and her own knowledge now of her adult life. We know she survived—she wrote a memoir about it.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From The Public Domain Review:

This year [2014], the works of one of the most successful and universal writers of all time came into the public domain in many countries around the world. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck – in all, thirty-three books bearing the name “Beatrix Potter” have sold close to 200 million copies.

. . . .

Her appeal is so powerful that museums hold her in permanent exhibition – and some of them even commemorate her solely. Hollywood has trawled through her life, if somewhat on tiptoe. The great and the good have acknowledged her influence and the affection she inspires. Pottery, apparel, wallpaper – all kinds of domestic accoutrements bear her quaint, unthreatening drawings; her inescapably fluffy image has driven a licensing industry that has been worth millions. Yet Beatrix Potter was a sharp-edged, and reclusive woman, serious and complex, and her “nursery” reputation does her scant justice; she was much more than a “mere” children’s writer. Which, however, is where and how her famed “product” began – with the famous letter from Beatrix aged 27 to Noel Moore, aged 6, the little son of her final governess;

Sep 4th 93

My dear Noel, I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail – and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree…

She called it a “picture letter.” In among the words she had sketched each character in the tale, with Peter unquestionably the perkiest: he’s the only one standing upright. As adults’ novelists do, she had taken him from life – Peter Rabbit was based on a Belgian buck, she’d given him the name “Peter Piper” and described him thus: “Whatever the shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet.”

Link to the rest at The Public Domain Review

From School Library Journal:

Children’s literature has been, historically, a site for the origin of ideas about race and racism in the United States. Since I was a child, I have wondered why Black children show up most often in certain genres of the fictions of childhood, and not in others. I grew weary of many of the Black children’s books I read when I was in school. It seemed that if we weren’t following the North Star to freedom or marching for civil rights, we were dodging bullets in the ghetto, or we were the Black best friend in the otherwise all-white landscapes of childhood and teen life. Although we’ve seen movement in recent years, my weariness has shown up during recent presentations as a cynical joke about “The Five Black Kids You Meet in Children’s Literature.” It’s quite telling that audiences almost always laugh. Knowingly.

They’ve met those kids in books, too.

Children’s literature is becoming more inclusive. But it has been a long, complicated road, and the journey is ongoing. Black child readers, and their teachers, families, and communities, occupy a unique place when it comes to stories for children that deal with race. The collective trauma of enslavement—what literature scholar Saidiya Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery—has continuing implications for the descendants of enslaved people living today. That’s because slavery influences the way that Black people are perceived, more than 150 years after Emancipation. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois notes the presence of Blackness as always already being a problem, in reality and imagination:

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem?
I answer seldom a word.

Women, people of color, and other marginalized populations have always had to read ourselves into literary canons where we were absent.

We’ve always told our own stories. Black storytelling extend deep into our past, predating the Middle Passage and the Door of No Return, as poet and essayist Dionne Brand observes. After passing through the Door, African Americans have had to write ourselves into existence. Recently, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and author Renée Watson came up with another lyrical metaphor—Born on the Water, the title of their 2021 picture book in verse, derived from the 1619 Project. Black storytelling traditions have always existed in the shadows of the American story—and that includes in children’s books.

“The lost shadow book is the book that Blackness writes every day,” poet Kevin Young writes in The Grey Album. “The book that memory, time, accident, and the more active forms of oppression prevent from being read.”

I love this observation. Despite adversity, oppression, and the shadow books lost along the way, Black people have kept storying. “Storying,” Young writes, is how “Black writers have forged their own traditions, their own identities, even their own freedom.”

Prominent in the shadows cast by Black children’s literature is The Brownies’ Book, a periodical for Black children published in 1920–21 by Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, an editor and writer. Also published in 1921 was Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, which includes the observation about enslaved Black Americans, “the Negroes were strong and could stand rough treatment.” It won the inaugural Newbery Medal the next year. Issues of The Brownies’ Book included stories, photographs, games, poetry, and information on current events; a goal was to dispel stereotypes of Black people and expand Black children’s literature. The Brownies’ Book was missing from mainstream shelves, but present in Black communities.

Link to the rest at School Library Journal

From School Library Journal:

I first heard the term “browsable nonfiction” used by Jennifer Emmett, senior vice president of National Geographic for Kids in 2012 at a Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) writing retreat in Silver Bay, NY. It’s the perfect moniker for a popular category of children’s books inspired by Dorling Kindersley’s groundbreaking Eyewitness Book series.

When these lavishly photo-illustrated books entered the U.S. marketplace in 1991, they revolutionized children’s nonfiction by giving young fact lovers a fresh, engaging way to access information. Both then and now, the eye-catching design and short blocks of clear, straightforward expository text delight “info-kids” who crave knowledge about the world and how it works and their place in it.

Here’s what some young readers have to say about browsable books:

“You can open to any page and find a cool fact, and I like reading cool facts.” —Lily, second grader
“You have a lot of choices about how you read. It’s like the potluck dinners at my church.” —Matthew, fourth grader

“I like the design. I prefer to flip through the pages to find exactly what I’m looking for rather than having to read through a whole book.” —Keith, fifth grader
The ability to dip in and out of these books instead of reading from cover to cover is a key characteristic of browsable nonfiction, but—initially—it was this very aspect of the category that worried adults.

“When Eyewitness Books first came out, some educators thought the format would interfere with students’ ability to develop critical reading skills,” says Michele Nokleby, school librarian, Hawthorne Elementary School, Missoula, MT. “They wondered: Would these books impact reading stamina? Would they affect students’ attention spans? As a result, teachers were hesitant to use them in the classroom.”

Luckily, that attitude has changed. As is increasingly true with graphic novels, educators now recognize that browsable nonfiction is a gateway to literacy for many children. And according to Marlene Correia, associate professor of elementary and early childhood education, Bridgewater (MA) State University, these books can also “help students who prefer fiction develop the skills necessary to navigate the more complex expository texts they’ll encounter in high school and college, and in their future careers.”

Link to the rest at School Library Journal

From c/net:

Author Soman Chainani has spent 10 years working on his children’s book series The School for Good and Evil. He finished the sixth, and last, book in the series, One True King, in March 2020, and says he was ready to take the rest of the year to relax and head out on new adventures. But the day after he turned in the manuscript, COVID-19 happened and so he spent most of 2020 pretty much indoors.

What did he do during lockdown? He wrote a new book, called Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales, which has just been released.

Just like The School for Good and Evil, which aimed to upend the fairy tale genre, Beasts and Beauty reinvents 12 classic stories, including Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Peter Pan. There’s a common thread in his approach: Chainani says he thinks of fairy tales as “survival guides to life” and he wants kids to consider the heroes and villains in a completely different way, non-Disney way.

. . . .

“I grew up with Disney fairy tales almost exclusively in our house … and so my entire viewpoint of good and evil is shaped by Disney, and I would honestly say I think most people in my generation and above have their morality shaped by Disney, which is why I’m not surprised that our politics is so polarized,” Chainani explains in an interview for CNET’s I’m So Obsessed podcast.

“Because when you have such a clear good guy and evil guy in all our storytelling … it means that one side has to live and one side has to die, and you’re not going to make any accommodations for either.”

. . . .

As a college student at Harvard University, Chainani reread the original classic fairy tales and learned how much “room for ambiguity and good and grayness and in-the-spectrum-between-good-and-evil there is.” That thinking led to The School for Good and Evil in 2013, which tells the story of 12-year-old friends Sophie and Agatha who go to a magical school where children are trained to become fairy-tale heroes or villains (Evers and Nevers).

Chainani says he wanted to upend “this idea that we brand the evil kids ‘the bad kids’ without understanding who they are and what they’re about and understanding that we all have a different way of approaching life.”

“Once you start experimenting, and giving people the chance to mess with their identity and experience life from the opposite perspective, all hell’s gonna break loose,” he says with a laugh. “But in a way, that’s going to ultimately lead to a more positive reconstruction of the world.”

. . . .

The series has sold more than 2.5 million copies and Netflix is adapting The School for Good and Evil into an original movie set for release in 2022. It’s being directed by Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids and Spy) and stars Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, Michelle Yeoh and Laurence Fishburne. “It’s going to be a big huge fairy-tale, action spectacular,” Chainani told his fans.

With Beast and Beauty, Chainani decided to “blow up the fairy tales and retell them as if I was the Brothers Grimm in the 1700s and I could see what the world would look like now.” That’s why Snow White is the only black girl in an all-white kingdom and Red Riding Hood is about how the most beautiful girl in town is marked for sacrifice every spring to a pack of wolves/boys in what he describes as the “ultimate #MeToo experience.”

Link to the rest at c/net

From The Guardian:

A recent study in People and Nature claims that animals are being written out of novels at a similar rate to their extinction in the real world. The German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research searched the entire online Project Gutenberg archive of 60,000 texts, written between 1705 and 1969. They found that since 1835, animal usage in fiction – other than domesticated beasts such as horses and dogs or “threat” animals such as bears or lions – has dwindled to a fraction of its former propensity. Professor Christian Wirth, the study’s senior author, argues that this has implications for our response to the climate crisis: “We can only halt the loss of biodiversity by a radical change in awareness.”I think he’s right, but not because animals have been written out of novels. They’ve just been written in the wrong way.

Like all such headline-making research papers, context is everything. I am not sure that public-domain books only, written in English only, from a western canon only, are fully representative of the rich and increasingly human diverse fictional world today. But the decline in actual biodiversity is terrifyingly real. According to the latest reports from the UN and WWF, we have not only lost 60% of animal populations since 1970, but one million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction if we do not act now.

Has that profound sense of loss in fact made animals more attractive to fiction writers? There is certainly no shortage of animals in the world of children’s literature. My latest book, The Wild Before – about tackling biodiversity decline – has a hare as a main character, and an animal cast, following in the tradition of books such as Watership Down. This past year alone has seen critically acclaimed children’s books starring a stranded polar bear, a haunting Greenland shark and a magical talking stray cat.

It is no coincidence that The Jungle Book, The Wind in the Willows and the Beatrix Potter books, early children’s classics of anthropomorphism, emerged out of the Industrial Revolution and the first huge jump in biodiversity decline. It appears that the less connected we are to other species, the more their mystery and appeal deepens. Would either Judith Kerr have invited a tiger in for tea, or Yann Martel set one sailing across the ocean in Life of Pi, if encounters with those endangered creatures were commonplace? Would the bestiary of fantasy creatures, from Tolkien’s wargs to George RR Martin’s direwolves (based on an extinct species), have captured our imagination if real wolves weren’t so absent from our landscape?

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The Drift:

“Harriet Tubman was born a slave, and her story could have ended there. Instead, she persisted, escaping from slavery and becoming the most famous ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad,” begins the first section of Chelsea Clinton’s baffling 2017 children’s book, She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, illustrated by Alexandra Boiger. True to its subtitle, the book marches on through thirteen stories of women persisting. Helen Keller persisted, by learning to read and write. Nellie Bly, told by a male colleague that working women were a “monstrosity,” persisted to become a working woman anyway. Sally Ride persisted to overcome stereotypes about women in STEM to travel to space. Ruby Bridges persisted when she attended kindergarten despite threats on her life from segregationists. Oprah Winfrey persisted by rising from humble origins to media superstardom. In case you managed to miss the message, it appears in bold, colorful letters in every woman’s story: “She persisted.”

This phrase, if you have managed to attain blissful amnesia about the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, is drawn from something Mitch McConnell said about Elizabeth Warren, after the Senate voted to stop her from speaking during Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearings. “She was warned. She was given an explanation,” McConnell said. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” This became an immediate feminist rallying cry, and was printed on bags, posters, pins, and t-shirts. In 2018, it was adopted as the “theme” of Women’s History Month (which, you might argue, already has a theme). Clinton notes in the dedication that she was “inspired by Senator Elizabeth Warren,” though Warren is not one of the book’s thirteen women who persisted.

This contemporary quote is an ill-considered retroactive framing device for a book about thirteen American women who lived during different times and under wildly different circumstances. There is an obvious flattening that occurs here: Winfrey’s persistence looked nothing like Bridges’s, or for that matter, Bly’s. Clinton applies a one-size-fits-all pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps narrative to multiple women’s stories in a way that ranges from tedious to outrageous; to suggest that Harriet Tubman’s story “could have ended there” if not for her persistence is to imply that people who were enslaved had individual responsibility to free themselves. Through grit and determination, the book suggests, any woman can succeed at any set of challenges! (And, it is careful to imply in some stories, pull other women up with them.) Reading She Persisted, one might get the impression that the experience of American womanhood over the course of the last 200 years has resembled that of doing an obstacle course — and winning.

She Persisted, whose original list price was $17.99, has sold nearly 450,000 copies and spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Unsurprisingly, it spawned sequels. There is now She Persisted Around the World, featuring a grab-bag of international women that includes J.K. Rowling, Malala Yousafzai, and nineteenth-century New Zealand suffragist Kate Sheppard. There is also She Persisted in Sports, about American Olympians who “changed the game.” It has even become a kind of franchise: there’s a series of chapter book biographies written by other authors that are sold under the She Persisted heading. (Clinton writes the intros.)

The project is a blockbuster in a genre that has become increasingly popular over the past decade: children’s books by political, or politics-adjacent, figures. Recent examples have been written by Kamala Harris, her niece Meena Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Charlotte and Karen Pence, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Sonia Sotomayor, Callista Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Jenna Bush Hager, and Barbara Pierce Bush. These join the realm of a related subset of picture books that are not by politicians themselves but that ride the coattails of political celebrity. The hagiographies include I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark; Mayor Pete: The Story of Pete Buttigieg; Revolution Road: A Bernie Bedtime Story; Little People, Big Dreams: Michelle Obama and Little People, Big Dreams: Kamala Harris; Joey: The Story of Joe Biden; Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls are Born to Lead; Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope; Journey to Freedom: Condoleezza Rice; Kamala Harris: Rooted in Justice; Today’s Heroes: Colin Powell and Today’s Heroes: Ben Carson; My Dad: John McCain (by Meghan); The ABCs of AOC: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from A to Z; a series comprised of Donald and the Fake News, Donald Builds the Wall! and Donald Drains the Swamp!; Elizabeth Warren: Nevertheless She Persisted; and, most recently, Dr. Fauci: How a Boy from Brooklyn Became America’s Doctor. Forthcoming this fall: Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi Calls the House to Order and Pinkie Promises by Elizabeth Warren.

These books are typically upbeat, didactic, and unimaginative. Many of them repackage the same themes and characters; frequently, authors select a set number of historical figures to celebrate. Obama picked thirteen American “heroes;” Chelsea Clinton picked thirteen American women; Gillibrand picked ten suffragists. They often rely on the repetition of certain catchphrases, so there is no way to miss the point, even when the point is remarkably banal. Yet they keep coming: in August, the imprint Philomel Books announced that it would be releasing ten more chapter books in the extended She Persisted universe, along with another picture book, She Persisted in Science: Brilliant Women Who Made a Difference.

One might feel compelled to ask why so many of these books exist, but the main reason is obvious: money. In 2003, Madonna published a picture book called The English Roses, a moralistic story about friendship and jealousy. Despite the fact that Madonna was not an obvious fit for a young audience, the book debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and reportedly sold more than a million copies worldwide. It has been translated into 42 languages. Like She Persisted, English Roses led to spinoffs and a chapter book series. And it became a kind of test case, evidence that even an unexpected celebrity author could produce a bestselling book for kids. As in the grown-up books market, an established name — any kind of name — goes pretty far. Unlike your average children’s authors, celebrities can leverage massive social media followings and public relations networks to promote their books; they might even get booked on late night shows. Since Madonna’s hit, celebrities as disparate as Katie Couric and Pharrell Williams have authored kids’ books. (Perhaps it goes without saying, but many employ ghostwriters or co-authors.) With enough starpower, these authors can command big advances: Meghan Markle was rumored to have been paid £500,000 for a children’s book called The Bench that, in a rare turn of events, was panned by critics. Still, it hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list for picture books.

Link to the rest at The Drift

What would we do without traditional publishers to curate our culture?

From Publishers Weekly:

When I was a teen, I’d have given anything for a book like Ordinary Hazards. Of course, it hadn’t yet been written. What I did discover back then was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. In her novel, I found Francie, a character I resonated with deeply. We weren’t of the same race, nor were our lives a perfect replica, by any stretch. Still, Smith’s character and I both faced tough challenges in our young lives, and like me, Francie knew the color of hell by heart. Because of her story, I knew that I wasn’t alone in the world, and knowing that gave me strength for my own journey. This is the power of story. This is why I became a purveyor of story, myself.

Over the course of my long career, I’ve written fiction, nonfiction, historical fiction, and poetry on a wide variety of subjects, but the one thing I’ve always believed is that the single most important story I have to tell is my own. Ordinary Hazards, my memoir in verse, is that story. It is a story of darkness and childhood trauma, of a parent’s alcoholism and mental illness, of the seamy side of foster care, and of sexual assault. But it is also a story of love and light, of faith and grace, and of a young girl’s discovery of the power of the written word.

Mine is a story of triumph over darkness, and, as such, is ultimately a story of hope. The possibility of planting seeds of hope in the hearts and minds of young readers is why I wrote Ordinary Hazards. As agonizing as it was to rip open the wounds of memory, I knew there were young people who needed a story like mine—and a true story, at that. And thousands of readers across the country have already been inspired by it. This is why I was stunned when I learned that a school district in Leander, Texas, had elected to remove my award-winning memoir from their curriculum.

What???

It is one thing to rip a book from your own teen’s personal library, but to interfere with every other teen’s access to that book throughout your school district goes beyond the pale.

Leander’s issue with Ordinary Hazards—and Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout, among other titles recently removed—is that these titles are considered to have “inappropriate content.” I’m assuming the content in question in Ordinary Hazards is difficult subject matter, namely alcoholism, sexual assault, and mental illness. Difficulty, though, is no reason to remove a book from an age-appropriate reader’s easy reach.

The truth is, the lives of many teens are difficult. Some are homeless, or have parents in prison, or have been bounced from one foster home to another—or all of the above. Other teens live, as I did, in homes where a parent wrestles with mental illness or alcoholism, or may struggle with these issues themselves. Finally, though you may be unaware, countless teens of every gender, sitting in high school classrooms right now, have been sexually assaulted. Is this subject uncomfortable? Absolutely. But writing about the topic is hardly inappropriate, especially when it’s handled delicately.

Censors will find nothing salacious, graphic, or gratuitous in Ordinary Hazards. I specifically chose to write my memoir in poetry because the form allows for the delicate treatment of difficult content. As such, no one can reasonably charge the writing itself of being inappropriate. When it comes to sexual abuse, what is inappropriate—not to mention criminal—is the abuse itself. Writing about that abuse is both appropriate and necessary. Teens need to know that sexual assault is not a secret to keep.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Book Riot:

The TV show Ted Lasso was not at all on my radar until I started to hear about it everywhere — from friends, on social media, and even on my professional Slack network. I am not a sports person, but I do succumb to peer pressure when it comes to certain media, and like many I devoured the AppleTV show in a single weekend. One of my favorite episodes in season 1 is episode 3, “Trent Crimm: The Independent.” In it, Coach Lasso is working hard to connect to his new football team and inspire them to make some essential changes in how they interact with one another. In order to accomplish that, he gives them all books that he hand-picks for their various needs and personalities. To surly, gruff team captain Roy Kent, who resents Coach Lasso’s upbeat attitude, Lasso gifts a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

Roy reluctantly starts reading the book, which at first he dismisses as a book about a “little girl.” L’Engle’s classic is about Meg, a young girl whose father has disappeared. She learns that he is being held captive by an evil force on the other side of the universe, and she must rescue him with the help of three mysterious entities. In one of my favorite scenes in the entire first season, Roy is reading the book aloud to his niece when he comes across a passage that illuminates why Coach Lasso gifted him the book in the first place. “F****!” he yells when the realization hits, because he now understands what he needs to do next in order to bring his team together.

It’s one of the most relatable moments of the show for me, and I think it speaks to the subtle, quiet power of children’s books. Adults tend to view books written for children as childish or just silly entertainment, but those of us who write for kids (and teens) know that there is usually a lot more going on underneath the surface. We assume these books are childish, but that’s the deception: Children’s books tend to contain the same big, complex ideas about life that adult novels do…but they’re conveyed in such a way that a young reader can grasp them.

However, I don’t think that a children’s book has to contain a lesson or be emotionally complex in order to be valuable to child or adult readers. As adults, we read books that are entertaining or silly or simply fun escapes, and children’s lit can be that, too. The value in returning to these books as adults is in reminding ourselves what it’s like to be a kid, to gain a different perspective on the world, and to expand our understanding of different experiences and communities. And, of course, to be entertained.

The exciting thing about children’s literature is that it’s constantly changing, so if you’re an adult reading this, there are some amazing books that have been published since your elementary and middle school days, and children’s writers are constantly elevating the field with their incredible writing and stories. Even if you don’t have any kids in your life, there is no one stopping you from picking up some amazing children’s books that run the range from silly to serious and will help expand your perspective. 

Link to the rest at Book Riot