Friday, October 16, 2009

Hoff, Your Readers Are Young, Not Stupid

I'm typically biased in favor of classics, and I rarely find myself disappointed, so it surprised me just how much I found to dislike in Syd Hoff's Danny and the Dinosaur (HarperCollins, 1958), which the New York Times hailed as an Outstanding Book of the Year, and which has stayed in print and remained a staple of kids' book collections for decades.  The story is cute enough.  A little boy goes to the museum, just because he "wanted to see what was inside" (an endearing moment), looks at some life-sized dinosaur models and wishes they were alive so he could play with them.  One does come to life, and they spend the day romping through the city together and having a grand time until the dinosaur has to go back to the museum and Danny has to go back to his own house, which he has to admit would be too small for a pet dinosaur.

Here's the first thing that bothered me.  Danny knows the dinos in the museum are fake--he says so--but when one speaks to him, there is not an instant of surprise.  The dinosaur offers to play with him, and away they go.  It's awkward and jolting: a definite hiccup in the smooth flow of the story.  Here's the next thing.  The dinosaur stops for red lights, knows what a car is, and understands the rules of baseball.  But he has no clue what buildings are; he mistakes them for tall rocks.

When Danny has to lift up clotheslines so the dino doesn't get his neck tangled in them, the narration reads, "Danny had to hold up the ropes for him."  Ropes?  Who calls clotheslines ropes?  Maybe Mr. Hoff thought "clotheslines" (or even "lines") would be too long a word for children, although I would imagine that a child capable of sitting through a 60-plus-page picture book could figure it out, and even if she couldn't, the picture of what Danny is doing would probably clear things up for her.  

Finally, the dino mentions more than once how nice it is to get out of the museum for an hour or two after a hundred million years.  One wonders, why didn't he ever just walk out before?  Did it take the presence of a wistful kid to wake him up?  If there was a magical formula that enabled him to play in the city all day, the story provides no hint of it.  And we must not ever give in to the temptation to dismiss inconsistencies by saying the story is "just for children."  That would imply that children are inherently less smart and/or less deserving of a coherent and cohesive story than adults are or that writers for children are also less smart and/or less skilled than writers for adults and that children's literature doesn't have to be intelligent as long as it is pretty.

Maybe the dinosaur is just dumb: as dumb as Mr. Hoff evidently thought his small readers would be.  It's a pity.  The illustrations are adorable.


Thursday, October 15, 2009

Score!

I love library book sales.  My local one hasn't had a big, official sale recently, but the other day when Matt and Isaiah were enjoying one of their Saturday afternoon adventures sans Mama, I wandered into the library's children's room--yes, even though I did not have my child with me--and browsed through the rack of discarded books for sale.

I picked up a pristine hardcover of Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood...for fifty cents, baby!  Yeah!  And then I spotted a picture book whose spine simply read, The Little Women Book.  I figured it was a watered-down version for little kids who couldn't sit through the novel yet, but I picked it up and flipped through it because I can never resist checking out what other writers, illustrators, actors, directors, etc., have done with my favorite book.  What I found was not an abridged Little Women but a supercool volume of DIY bliss.  Full title: The Little Women Book: Games, Recipes, Crafts, and Other Homemade Pleasures (Random House, 1995) by Lucille Reche Penner.

There's a recipe for that scrumptious-sounding pink and white ice cream and instructions for planting a "name" garden, making costumes for homespun plays, and sewing rag dolls.  This is my far the best secondhand treasure I have acquired in a long time.  I bought both books, but honestly, as much as I love Ann Brashares, I am much more excited by the prospect of doing some arts and crafts March-style.

Now all I need is a daughter.  

Saturday, October 3, 2009

It's Not Brilliant...But Is That So Terrible?


I reach for the steak knife hiding in the nest of spoons. The black handle is warm. As I pull it free, the blade slices the air, dividing it into slivers. There is Jennifer, packing store-bought cookies in a plastic tub for her daughter's class. There is Dad's empty chair, pretending he has no choice about these early meetings. There is the shadow of my mother, who prefers the phone because face-to-face takes too much time and usually ends in screaming.


Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corner. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it.


The narrator is Lia, an anorexic teenager who has just found out that her former best friend, Cassie (a bulimic), is dead. Jennifer is Lia's stepmother, who told her the news. The book is Wintergirls (Penguin Group, 2009) by Laurie Halse Andersen. It's pretty good. And that's it.


I recently watched a talk online in which Elizabeth Gilbert admitted, without any apparent bitterness, that her "freakish success" (referring to her bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love) probably doomed her much-anticipated future books to second-best status. Everything she ever wrote would be compared to it, and not much of her subsequent work would be likely to measure up. As a still-young writer, she confessed to her audience, it was possible that her biggest success was already behind her.


Gibert's talk centered on the theme of "genius".  Westerners tend to think of genius as something someone is, but Gilbert pointed out that other cultures have identified genius as something as artist has--and not an inherent something, either.  A genius (singular form of "genii") is a spirit of creativity that just drops in on an artist, often without warning.  The artist's job is to show up for work and be accessible to the genius, which can be frustrating at times and even downright drudgery, but the genius's job is to inject the project with life and brilliance...when it feels like it.

Gilbert enjoys this idea, and I do, too.  It takes the pressure off, and truly, it resonates.  The only good short story I ever wrote came out of me in high school.  And when I say "came out", I mean that's just what happened.  I heard the first sentence in my head, and I just sat down and began to write.  I barely revised.  I turned it in to my teacher, who nominated it for an award.  It won.  I have never written a passable short story since.

Something sort of like that happened to Laurie Halse Andersen.  In interviews she's described waking up in the middle of the night and hearing a young girl crying.  Andersen checked on her daughters, found all was well, and went back to sleep.  It kept happening.  Finally Andersen recognized the voice as coming from inside of her--her genius tapping on her shoulder.  She didn't know who the girl was or why she was crying, but Andersen knew she couldn't ignore her anymore; it was her job to write down this girl's pain, to crystallize it and make it known.  The girl turned out to be Melinda Sordino, a fourteen-year-old rape victim.  The novel that tells her story is Speak, probably one of the most important YA novels ever written and one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read.  If I were going to be a college professor and teach a YA literature class, Speak would be on the syllabus right alongside Little Women and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Wintergirls is OK.  

I was told by a children's literature editor that Andersen's historical fiction novel Fever 1793 was turned down by every publisher until after Speak came out.  By then Andersen could publish whatever she wanted.  But the genius has its own agenda, its own preferences.  Andersen's genius insisted on the creation of Speak as Gilbert's insisted on the creation of Eat Pray Love.  It's possible that after those pet projects were accomplished, the genii were satisfied and decided to check out for a while.  The writers keep showing up for work, as is their job, and they keep turning out books, because we expect them to and because that's what they do best.  But the genii come and go.  Sometimes they stay away.

Like Gilbert, Andersen's best work may well be behind her, but honestly, what's wrong with that?  To be the name on the cover of a book like Speak is not a bad deal for a writer, even if it means nothing else she writes afterward can quite measure up.  

As for us YA fans, I say go ahead and read Wintergirls.  It contained some powerful moments, like the one I quoted at the beginning, and I often had a hard time putting it down.  It's not Speak, so don't expect that, but it's Andersen--minus her genius, perhaps, but still pretty darn good.  Besides, we have our job, too: to keep showing up for the important work of reading.  When the genius does decide to come around, the writer has to be ready to channel its power, and the readers have to be ready to give it its due.