Under the Covers (Lisa Chellman)

In three short weeks, the children's book world will be abuzz with reactions to the Association for Library Service to Children's media awards, especially the Newbery and Caldecott. Diane Foote, Executive Director of ALSC, took time to answer some of my questions for The Prairie Wind, SCBWI Illinois' quarterly newsletter, with special focus on ALSC's awards and notable children's book lists.

You can read the interview here!

(There's currently a glitch with one of the links, but that's getting ironed out...)

Fuse #8 linked to these lists of the Hottest Baby Names of 2008, per Parents.com. (And while you're there, check out the whiteness of all those babies pictured! Not an Aaliyah among them, I bet.)

One thing that struck me, perusing the Top 50 lists, is how many names appeared on both lists. Eight of fifty are, based on popularity, gender-neutral. And I'm guessing that if you looked at the Top 100, you'd find a bunch more. Here are the eight:

• Avery (#15 girls/#13 boys)
• Riley (#16/#15)
• Dylan (#26/#23)
• Logan (#27/#24)
• Hayden (#35/#29)
• Bailey (#40/#31)
• Brooklyn (#41/#33)
• Taylor (#46/#35)

I have to admit, I'm a fan of gender-neutral names. I can't fully articulate why. My reasons range from thinking, "What if someday I have a child with ambiguous genitalia?" (yes, I really do ask myself these questions) to remembering how much I despised my own name when I was a kid (sorry, Mom). I never felt like a "Lisa," which struck me as a very delicate, feminine name. I wasn't pretty; I didn't want a pretty name.

I remember being thrilled in fourth grade when, in a musical, I got to choose a name for my character. I chose "Leslie"—which has lost popularity as a boys' name in the past couple decades but historically is gender-neutral. (Not that I was thinking of it that way at the time.) At one Scout camp I worked at, I went by "Wishbone," after the cook in Rawhide. At another, "Pete." Sometimes I still forget, when people say "Lisa," they're talking about me.

In one of my novel manuscripts, the main character has a gender-neutral name. The few people who read the first draft came back to me and said, "Hey, I didn't know until page eight that Colby was a girl. Was that intentional?" Actually, Holly Black, who critiqued my first ten pages at the Wisconsin SCBWI conference, said something to the effect of, "For the first eight pages, I thought Colby was a boy—and a real asshole!" And she was totally right. As a girl, Colby was merely angry; as a boy, Colby was a first-class jerk. I ended up revising the second paragraph to include a gender reference, clearing up the confusion and exonerating Colby of asshole-ism.

Not that it always matters. A friend pointed me to Fish, by L. S. Matthews. The story is told in first person by a completely gender-ambiguous narrator. The narrator is referred to only as "you," "Tiger," or "the child." A very rare thing, no? I think I've seen some first-person picture books with gender-ambiguous narrators, but they're definitely in the minority, especially when illustrations come into the mix. Can you think of any?

One more thing about these "hot" baby names—the obsession with Aidan is getting on my nerves. Check out these names from the boys' list:

• Aidan (#1)
• Jayden (#2)
• Caden (#6)
• Peyton (#17)
• Hayden (#29)
• Brayden (#37)

Am I the only one who thinks this is a little silly? I mean, we're naming babies, not playing the Name Game, right? I half expected Bananafanafofaden to make the list.

Susan at Wizards Wireless has a great post about authors who reuse characters and plot devices so consistently you can predict the plot before you open their next book. Susan breaks down the Harry Potter books, Amelia Bedelia, and L. M. Montgomery novels, and she invites readers to join in with their familiar favorites.

Lloyd Alexander is my personal love-to-hate author in this regard. When I was a kid, I totally loved his books, particularly the Prydain Chronicles and the Westmark trilogy (and I still do). But having read those series several times over and then moving onto his stand-alone novels, each time I open one of his books I'm overcome with déjà vu.

Sam Riddleburger blogged about this very issue last year after the publication of The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio and posed the question why did Lloyd Alexander essentially rewrite the same story again and again. There are some great comments on that post, and Jason Fisher responded at length on his own blog. If this matter has ever haunted you as it has me, check out both posts.

(I started to write out my own character/plot analysis, but it was so similar to Sam's I decided not to bother. That itself should be evidence of how consistent/repetitive Alexander was.)

That said, I believe Lloyd Alexander's books are well worth reading. The Prydain Chronicles (among them the Newbery Honor-winning The Black Cauldron and the Newbery Award-winning The High King) stand up as a top-notch high fantasy series, forty years after publication. The Westmark trilogy, as well as being a great adventure series, is fascinating for its treatment of governmental revolution. The Rope Trick has one of the strangest endings I've ever read in a children's book... which actually, I guess, depending on how you like your endings, may or may not be a strong selling point.

However, the Vesper Holly books—which I think of as Sherlock Holmes meets Indiana Jones but with a smart, brave young woman as the hero—are the only Alexander books I know that break the mold.

How about you? Head over to Wizards Wireless and share your thoughts. (I know some of my friends could probably write a Baby-Sitters Club synopsis in their sleep!)

Whenever I go to someone else's house, I love to see what books they have on their shelves. In the case of my mother-in-law, it's an eclectic assortment of literary and commercial fiction, children's literature, and nonfiction. So the past few days I've been reading The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights, by Deborah Rudacille, and Second Glance, by Jodi Picoult.

Interestingly, the epigraph for The Riddle of Gender is "Pied Beauty", which I shared back in September. I also really liked the epigraph for Second Glance, attributed to Samuel Coleridge Taylor:
 

What if you slept?

And what if
in your sleep
you dreamed?

And what if
in your dream
you went to heaven
and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?

And what if
when you awoke
you had that flower in your hand?

Ah, what then?

It reminds me of many a childhood fantasy book that would almost have readers believe "it was all just a dream"—were it not for mud on the shoes, a bruised knee, a jingle bell under the Christmas tree. I always liked that reassurance that, in spite of the big old "fiction" label on the spine, the story was real.

What a disappointment it was to learn that Oz was but a dream to Dorothy Gale! And what a relief when she returned there for another thirteen books. Not a dream after all, thank God.

I think that's why so many readers feel cheated by Life of Pi, Atonement, and other novels with wildly unreliable narrators. We want so hard to believe. We want to wake up from our reading trance and find relics of what we've read left in our hands.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Miss Rumphius Effect!

Editorial Ass discusses the pros and cons of publishing paperback originals as an alternative to hardcovers in these tough financial times. I found this article interesting from my different perspectives as librarian and prospective author.

From my public librarian standpoint, paperback originals are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I like hardcovers because they are far sturdier than paperbacks and can handle much heavier circulation. On the other hand, unless a book is very popular or on a school reading list (this includes award-winners), a hardcover book is not likely to circulate heavily—like, enough to fall apart within a few years.

Therefore, in my opinion, it might as well reap the benefits of being a paperback: greater visibility/browsability on our paperback carousels, greater portability for patrons who don't like to lug heavy books, and greater affordability if we need additional or replacement copies. Paperbacks (I'm talking fiction) circulate more heavily than hardcovers, and circulation is the way libraries define a book's success.

The main caveat is that unless they're part of a very heavily promoted series or imprint (e.g., Aladdin MIX) that puts them on our radar, the books must be reviewed, and reviewed positively, in journals such as Kirkus, School Library Journal, Booklist, and VOYA for my library to order them. (Other libraries may treat paperback originals differently.)

From the perspective of a prospective author, I have mixed feelings as well. As EA notes, there's this nose-wrinkling in the industry that if a book was published as a paperback original, it's because your publishing house didn't take the book "seriously."

I have to admit, I've been guilty of nose-wrinkling myself—which was why I was so surprised that three of the first four YA books from Flux to garner starred reviews from major publications were—you guessed it—paperback originals: The Shape of Water, by Anne Spollen, Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, by Maggie Stiefvater, and The Way He Lived, by Emily Wing Smith. (Hopefully I've got that right... And the fourth, published in hardcover, was Everything You Want, by Barbara Shoup.) So, obviously there's no obvious correlation there between literary quality and binding.

And if a paperback's affordability makes it that much more likely for customers to buy my (hypothetical) book? Well, it's hard to say no to that. Sure, a hardcover looks good and feels good. But, having worked in a library for several years now, I've come to view both hardcovers and paperbacks as ephemeral objects. There's no other way to approach the fact that something like 98% of books go out of print within a few years. Knowing I'm unlikely to be one of those authors whose books are in print 20/50/100 years from original publication makes it seem to matter a little less.

Finally, speaking as both librarian and prospective author, if in these tough financial times we're faced with the choice of either severely cutting down the number of books published period or publishing many more trade books as paperback originals than as hardcovers, I prefer the latter. As a librarian, I prefer many voices to few. And as a prospective author, I'd like mine to be one of them.

(Via Cynsations.)