Blog Archive: March 2008

As a librarian working in an on-average privileged community, I see a lot of bright kids—and even more pushy parents. I don’t mean “pushy” as in rude—though it happens, as in any community—but rather as in being extremely concerned about pushing their children toward academic achievement.

How many books their children read, and how thick they are, seems to be a bigger measure of status among parents than the kids themselves. We get no stronger proof than during our summer reading program, when kids look on, mortified, as their parents throw fits over page counts, when there’s nothing more at stake than a pencil, a beach ball, or a temporary tattoo.

We hear the phrase “exceptional reader” a lot. As in, “My first grader is an exceptional reader. He/she has read Harry Potter.” I’m sure there’s not a children’s librarian in this country who hasn’t heard that one, and probably hundreds of times at that. Harry Potter is the 21st century’s benchmark for literacy, it seems. One’s child has not truly “arrived” if she/he has not read Harry Potter. (Understood? Enjoyed? Not nearly as important!)

Of course, after 600+ page doorstops like the latter Harry Potter books, it’s hard to imagine how a slim volume like The Cricket in Times Square or Clementine could possibly measure up. Harry Potter has made—please pardon the expression—size queens of a whole new generation of readers and their parents. “Under 200 pages? Oh, my child couldn’t possibly… He/she is an exceptional reader, you know.”

The snark inside me wants to respond, “I know this great book called War and Peace your fourth grader might enjoy. Or how about The Stand?” But discretion is the better part of valor, yadda yadda.

Thursday, The Monkey Speaks posted about the challenge grade school teachers face when choosing age-appropriate (there’s another phrase I hear a dozen times a day) books to complement their curriculum, with a link to an interesting Washington Post article on that topic, “Question for the Ages: What Books When?”

The illuminating example given is Lester and Brown’s picture book Slave Ship to Freedom being denounced by parents as too violent for third graders because of its subject matter, while Treasure Island is dismissed as too easy for seventh graders. Many parents want their children to consistently read books the size of Harry Potter, but at the same time want to shelter their babies from the harsher aspects of reality.

I’m always relieved when I meet parents who recognize that their “exceptional reader” isn’t ready for the often darker subject matter of older middle grade and early YA books. They seem to accept more readily that size and subject matter are often positively correlated, and that size and quality aren't, and that maybe their child wouldn’t mind carrying a 150 page paperback for a change.

Does any color of the rainbow carry a greater stigma in our society than pink? From clothing to toys to—as Read Roger points out—books, if it’s pink it shouts, “I’M FOR GIRLS.” And even more loudly, “I’M NOT FOR BOYS.”

Many girls reject pink, but fewer boys embrace it. And obviously, there’s nothing biological about it. From the 1920s to the 1940s in America, pink was the preferred color for boys, as it was derivative of red; blue was the preferred color for girls. How red translates to “manly” and blue to “delicate,” I’m not sure. Blood? Bluebells? Then, in the 1940s, and just as arbitrarily, the switch was made.

We’re now 60-plus years into the pink=feminine phenomenon, and we’re more entrenched than ever. When I greet the toddlers for storytime, I notice the little boys are dressed in brown, orange, blue, red, green. The little girls? Light pink, dark pink, hot pink. But pink all the way. It’s the color of Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake. It’s the color of Disney Princesses. Don’t be fooled by Belle’s yellow dress or Cinderella’s blue. Go to their website, look at their packaging, and you’ll feel like you’ve been chugging Pepto-Bismol.

Amazing how decades of marketing can make a color so fraught with meaning. (And that’s just the gender aspect.)

As a librarian, I’m concerned by the color pink. It serves its particular role (“I’M FOR GIRLS! NOT BOYS!”), which works really well with books about princesses and fairies and otherwise “girly” topics. But what about books that are not as pink on the outside as they are on the inside? Books that have as much boy appeal as girl appeal except for the pink all over the cover?

Take Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst, a really fun, well-written fantasy that has enough danger and humor and intrigue to easily jump the gender divide. The cover is not only pink and purple, it’s got “girly” swirly patterns all over it. I was hoping the paperback, coming out this spring, would have a cover demonstrating more excitement and danger. Nope. And the upcoming sequel’s pink, too.

Then there’s Jennifer Holm and Matthew Holm’s Babymouse series. All right, so it’s called “Babymouse”—not the most masculine-sounding title ever. But the books are hilarious! Great potential appeal for both boys and girls. Even my husband likes them. Yet, they’re oh-so-very pink.

Ideally, of course, there would be no stigma for boys walking around with pink books. But that’s the polarizing nature of pink. It sells to a particular audience, and scares the others away, by screaming over and over again, “PINK IS FOR GIRLS, NOT BOYS!” Being a “reader” has enough stigma for some kids, especially boys, as it is. Do we really need to scare them off further?

ETA, 3/27/08: Thanks to Jacket Whys for today's round-up on pink books, especially the link to this Times Online article, “How judging a book by its ‘girlie’ cover is putting boys off reading.” Just the kind of thing I'm worried about.

Just when I really needed a laugh, my filmmaker/writer/librarian friend Daniel Kraus at American Libraries sent me this hilarious video homage to working at the reference desk. In fact, it's probably worth it just for the adorable, monsteriffic opening sequence.

Dan's the main brain behind AL Focus, American Libraries' web video series. This video is the first in a series of eight promoting National Library Week in April. I'll be looking forward to the rest!

Happy Equinox! How I love that word, equinox, so magical and mysterious-sounding. And come springtime, I love what it means even more. More daylight than nighttime! Crocuses and daffodils! T-shirts and open windows! I’d definitely put the vernal equinox in Room Lovely.

What is Room Lovely? First you need to know about Room 101. In Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 was the dreaded chamber where dissidents would be tortured with whatever they feared most. For example, if Indiana Jones went into Room 101, he would most assuredly scream, “Why did it have to be snakes?”

Anyway, the British, wonderfully odd ducks that they are, have a TV program called Room 101, in which various British personalities discuss things they hate with funny man host Paul Merton. If Merton agrees with the guest, with a pull of a lever, those things (or a physical representation of them) go down the chute into Room 101.

And that’s it. That’s all there is to it. This is why you’ve got to love the BBC.

Recently, I watched the episode of Room 101 in which Stephen Fry was the guest (currently available on YouTube). You’d probably know Stephen Fry as the actor who played Jeeves in TV’s Jeeves and Wooster, the narrator of the British Harry Potter audiobooks, or—the way I know him—the host of the offbeat BBC comedy/talk/quiz/intellectual show QI. Fry is a remarkable extemporaneous speaker. Everything he says sounds incredibly intelligent—generally because it is. Oh, all right, and because he’s got a British accent.

Anyway, Stephen Fry’s the one who suggested that instead of focusing on the negative, sending things you hate to Room 101, we ought to send things we love to a place called Room Lovely—and that Room 101 itself ought to be sent to Room 101.

Earlier in the show, he also remarked on critics. I believe late night TV film critics were the specific target of his ire, but he talked about professional critics more generally:

I just have this feeling that these people are going to go, when they’re dead, and St. Peter’s going to say, “What did you do with your life?”

You know, I think it’s just a terrible waste of a life.

Now, as the person who develops my library’s picture book collection based almost exclusively on journal reviews, I do rely heavily on such criticism. And I want to read scathingly honest reviews. I hate ordering books based on gently positive reviews, to find them blah on multiple levels (in own admittedly critical eyes). In our media-buried world, we need critics. There’s just too much material out there to wade through to the junk to the good stuff all by ourselves.

And we need to be critical consumers on our own, too. Even a garbage disposal won’t eat everything you feed it. (Ever drop a spoon in there? It’s not pretty.) It revolts me to think of the blank-stared, slack-jawed couch potato who passively ingests all media that comes his or her way. Do take in books, movies, music, TV, but don’t just gulp them down. Taste them. If you find them pleasing, savor them. If you don’t, spit them out. And think about why. Think about how they might have been better and how they make you see the world differently, if only for a few minutes. Discuss them. Think about them in the shower or when you’re lying awake in the middle of the night.

But best of all, be an active producer, creating your own content, whether it's a book or a painting or a garden or a wooly hat or a delcious meal. You still need to be critical. Developing a critical eye is essential to writing. You need to be able to recognize what is successful and what is not in the books you read, apply what you’ve learned in your own writing, and critically approach what you’ve written. You won’t always be able to recognize just what you’re doing right or wrong, but you can’t be completely hopeless at it, either, or you’ll never improve.

Believe it or not, this is all a lead-up to the revelation that I don’t generally like writing book reviews and have no desire to advance my career in librarianship through professional reviewing. I do read critically, view critically, listen critically, but when it comes down to it, I don’t usually feel like taking the time to write down my thoughts for a public forum like this. It takes a very special piece of work to do that, and even then I have to be in the right mood. It really takes a lot of thought and time and energy to write good reviews. And that’s thought and time and energy that, most days, I’d much rather put toward creating my own work than critiquing others’.

I’m not about to put the critics in Room 101. We need them. But I’m with Stephen Fry in wanting to put my own arms, legs, and soul to work, doing things, rather than spending my precious time remarking on what other people are doing with their own precious time.

This week’s Savage Love struck a chord with me. (Why am I mentioning a sex advice column in a blog that’s largely about books for young people? Bear with me.) The column, “How to Cope in the Closet,” features three letters by gay teens and serves as a reminder that as much as things on average are improving for queer youth in America in terms of support and acceptance, there’s such a long way to go.

In the first letter, a lesbian in high school who since coming out has dealt with daily harassment and ostracization by her peers and the unresponsiveness of school staff. Or the second letter, by a gay boy from an evangelical Christian family who, since being caught with gay porn on his computer, has been interrogated nightly by his parents about whether he has a girlfriend yet. Even the final letter, by a gay boy now out to his supportive family, is sadly telling; he and his boyfriend were too scared to come out until they were caught making out by his parents.

These aren’t the worst stories you’ll ever hear, of course—to quote the girl in the first letter, “nothing too terrible, no physical violence.” What they are is typical stories. Par for the course.

I’m always agog when I encounter adults in their 20s and 30s who claim they went to a high school where “no one batted an eye” at kids who were queer or suspected of it. These adults are never queer themselves, so I’ll excuse a little naïveté, but still I wonder what planet they’re from. At my high school, in the mid-1990s, if no one was harassed or bashed (yeah, right), it was for the simple reason that nobody was out.

At that time, in my county there was no in-school support for queer and questioning teens, besides talking to a guidance counselor (whose quality varied). The only non-university support group in the area was hosted by the lesbian and gay resource center downtown. Kids regularly came from 20 miles away, and sometimes it was more like 50.

Since that time, brave kids at my hometown high schools have started gay-straight alliances, which I’m sure has done wonders for the climate. But this was in a fairly cosmopolitan city, for its size. What about all the places in America that, twelve years later, are still without a lesbian and gay resource center with 50 or even 100 miles, much less a GSA in every high school?

Where am I going with this? Well, I believe positive books about being GLBTQ are probably the closest thing to a universal support system available to queer youth in America. (Yes, there’s the Internet. The Internet is fantastic. But it’s as easy to find the wrong stuff as the right—maybe easier.) I say this because public libraries, assuming they’re conforming to the Library Bill of Rights , make these books available to any person in the community, for free, anonymously. These books will never make up for or excuse a negative climate for Q&Q kids, but they offer solidarity, reassurance, information, and hope.

Now, one thing that bothers me about the children’s book industry is the way sexual orientation and gender identity (“alternative,” that is) are still overwhelmingly treated as illicit topics for mature readers only—like sexual intercourse or drugs and alcohol. I say illicit because for the most part you only see these topics treated in books marketed for high schoolers. One industry professional told me coming out novels are overdone, yet said in the same breath that sexual orientation isn’t an appropriate topic for a middle grade novel. To which I can only respond: you’re wrong.

Coming to terms with being straight, gay, bisexual, trans, fill-in-the-blank starts long before puberty hits, whether you’re conscious of it at the time or not. No sexual/gender identity is illegal. It isn’t a disease or psychological disorder. And (going out on a crazy liberal limb here, I know) it’s not a sin to live your life with honesty and dignity. If children’s book professionals support this view and want to do their bit to improve the social climate for Q&Q youth, they need to shake off the notion that high school is the right time to start talking about it. High school is too late. “Better late than never,” yes, but too late just the same.

Three notable middle grade exceptions to the trend are James Howe’s Totally Joe, Alex Sanchez’s So Hard to Say, and Lisa Jahn-Clough’s Country Girl, City Girl, each of which has middle school age characters coming to terms with sexual orientation. These books make concrete what ought to be obvious: that middle grade books with queer characters aren’t any more illicit than Jenny Han’s Shug, Jerry Spinelli’s Love, Stargirl, or the slew of other books for that age group that include a chaste boy-girl kiss.

Off the soapbox for now. Let me take the opportunity to link to some of my favorite websites to learn about GLTBQ books for young people.

Worth the Trip - Uber-librarian KT Horning blogs about youth books new and old with GLTBQ characters and/or themes.

I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read? - Writer Lee Wind posts GLTBQ book blurbs as well as blogging about various other queer media issues.

Great Gay Books for Teens - An annotated bibliography by authors Alex Sanchez and James Howe.

ETA, 3/25/08: In my list of middle grade GLBTQ books, I somehow managed to forget David LaRochelle's Absolutely, Positively Not. The main character is in high school, but the book, which is laugh-out-loud funny, definitely speaks to a younger audience as well. Has there ever been another queer book to win the Sid Fleischman Humor Award?!