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Is Any Book A Good Book?

Well, the answer to that question is obvious, I think. Of course not. Some books are just not very good. As a review site, of course we discriminate between what makes a story worth reading, and what doesn’t. Otherwise, what good would we be as a resource for readers and librarians? We all have limited time and money for books.

But MonsterLibrarian.com is just that. A resource. People see what we have to say and make their own choices based on that, and probably also recommendations from friends, colleagues, Goodreads, and other review sites, advertisements on the Internet, catalogs and flyers in your mailbox (if you’re a librarian) and reviews in magazines and publications of various kinds. You choose where you’ll go for recommendations, and who you’ll trust to direct you to the “next good book” as we like to say here. I hope you choose to come here and take advantage of our hard work.

To go a little further, is any book that gets people reading a “good book”? I think Dylan, the Monster Librarian, would say yes. And this is a philosophy that I see a lot. Are the Twilight books good books? They got a lot of people reading. That’s a good thing… but are they good books? I think the writing is pretty bad, so I’m going to say no, I don’t think they are. Would I buy them for my YA collection, if I were buying for one? With such high demand, you’ve gotta give them what they want. You don’t take books out of the hands of people who are desperate to read them, especially if this is the first time they’ve ever really wanted to read a book. And I do know people for whom Twilight was the first book they read from cover to cover. But not the last.

I don’t especially like the school of thought that says “well, it’s okay to let them get the bug with R.L. Stine, because at least they’re reading, and that will transfer into a love of great literature in the future”. Maybe, but that’s condescending to those kids. Stine doesn’t even pretend that his books have classic literary value. Like a lot of series books, his books use fairly simple language, predictable structure, and cliffhangers at the endings of chapters to keep kids going. Not everything kids read is great literature, even in the classroom. If you have seen some of the little phonics readers kids use you know that is not even expected. “I put my hat in the van. I put the map in the van. Dad gets in the van”. Simple language, predictable structure (no cliffhangers, though, sadly). We can share the cool books that aren’t Goosebumps or Twilight without seeing them as just a stepping stone. They’re where the reader IS. And maybe the reader will be there for a long time. There are enough Goosebumps books and knockoffs to last the kid who wants them or needs them for a very long time.

But there are also a lot of other books– fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for kids that are funny and suspenseful and unbelievable. And someday kids will be done with Goosebumps, just like kids from 30 years ago eventually outgrew the series adventures of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield and kids from 60 years ago eventually outgrew Nancy Drew to go on to other kinds of books. Maybe their interests will take them in the direction of new, similar series and genre fiction(which is often, despite its disreputable status in literary circles, extremely good) and maybe their reading will be shaped by other interests and experiences. Some of those books might be food for thought– but maybe not the ones we might expect. And some may be pure escapism (also maybe not the ones we might expect).

Not every book is a good book. But sometimes it’s enough to tell a good story, one that fits readers at their particular time and place. But those books don’t exist in isolation, even if the reader has a narrow view. Put those stories in the midst of many, and let serendipity take us on its meandering course on the shelves and through the stacks, whether that’s in the classroom, in the library, or at home.

Posted on September 19, 2012 by , Reply

Wanted: Volunteer Reviewers

MonsterLibrarian.com was started in 2005, while Dylan was finishing up his degree in library science. A voracious reader of horror fiction, he discovered that horror readers were an underserved population in the public library.  He wanted to change that, so he started up this site.

At first he was the only reviewer, writing short reviews of the books he owned, that he thought librarians should be aware of. Because of the attraction of horror fiction to reluctant readers, he also started teen and kids’ sections to the site. As a children’s and school librarian, I was happy to help out.

And then people started sending us books– more than we could possibly review on our own.  We discovered that volunteer reviewers are essential to making MonsterLibrarian.com a useful resource to librarians. Many of the reviewers we’ve had over the years have put serious time into the site, contributing their talents and energy in an amazing number of ways. These are true lovers of horror fiction who really believe in the importance of getting out the news about great horror fiction.

The site keeps growing and we keep getting more books and requests for review.  And thus, we are once again looking for volunteer reviewers to take these off our hands and get the word out about great books.

If you would like to review for us, please email us at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com.

We’ll get our review guidelines out to you so you can see if you are interested.

If there’s anyone out there who would like to review teen or children’s books, these are very popular parts of our site, although we don’t get many review copies– but if you’d like to start out like we did, reviewing books from your own collection, you’d rock my world.

We can’t do it without volunteer reviewers. Please spread the word! And thank you for being part of MonsterLibrarian.com!

Posted on August 30, 2012 by , Reply

Pictures That Storm Inside My Head: Outside Over There

I’m stealing the title of this post from a poem that appears in a book of the same name to discuss Outside Over There, and there’s a reason for that.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the movie Labyrinth. In it, Jennifer Connelly has to enter the realm of the Goblin King (David Bowie) to save her brother (the movie will be discussed as part of the next Parental Advisory podcast).The movie is, in part, inspired by the works of Maurice Sendak, and, in particular, his 1981 book Outside Over There. The plot of Outside Over There is very similar– in it, 9 year old Ida’s baby sister is stolen by goblins, and Ida must journey into “outside over there” to find and rescue her.

Sendak said in an interview that Outside Over There is the last of three books created to acknowledge the inner world of children, which is often chaotic and feels out of control (I’m paraphrasing radically here). The other two books are Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen. Of the three Outside Over There is, I think, the most unsettling and the most fascinating.

In Where The Wild Things Are, Max’s anger and imagination can’t be contained within mere physical walls. His escape allows him to get his out of control feelings out, to calm down and return home, a place where he can count on coming back home, to soup that is “still hot”. While it’s not a comfortable book for a lot of people, it has a comforting resolution. That isn’t the case in Outside Over There.

Ida’s parents are absent– her father is literally out to sea, and her mother is mentally unavailable. This leaves Ida with unwanted responsibility for her sister. While Ida is, in the words of my son, “busily doing something else”, goblins steal her sister away, leaving an ice baby. And Ida, at first, doesn’t notice. As her anger rises, there’s a storm out the window with a ship astray at sea.

This is the nightmare of so many parents– that their child might be stolen away. And it’s unsettling to certain children that their parents might be absent, even if they’re there; that they could be kidnapped themselves; that their sibling could go missing on their watch; that, like “Ida mad”, they could hold that terrible storm inside.

Ida goes on a journey to find her sister, but she is lost. She’s going in the wrong direction, still unable to see her sister in the goblin world of “outside over there”. When finally she turns around and finds the goblins, they are all babies, and, like the Pied Piper she must charm them away with music into the churning water to reveal which one is her sister. Like Max, she takes control, and finds her way back home. In the illustrations the goblin babies are fascinating and disturbing. Those are the pictures my daughter turns to again and again.

But unlike Max, Ida does not return to the comfort of a mother who nourishes him even when she’s not present. Instead, she comes home to a letter from her father telling her to take care of her mother and sister. Her storm has passed, but she doesn’t get to be a child again.

Outside Over There contains feelings both frightening and glad, ambiguous wording, and illustrations that create the impression of a strangely wrought and unpredictable fairly tale. When I talk about it with my daughter it’s in a very nonlinear fashion. We examine the illustrations, we talk about what some words and phrases mean, we skip around and come up with more answers than questions. For her this is fascinating, but not really recognizable as a traditional story. My son, an older brother who is often “busily doing something else” or doesn’t necessarily want his sister on top of him all the time, wants nothing to do with it. Ida’s anger, expressed so visibly and vividly, is unsettling to him.

Not that long ago I wrote about R.L. Stine’s comments on writing horror for children. Stine (to paraphrase) said that scary stories for children need to be over-the-top fantastic, funny, and sometimes gross, so that kids don’t think the stories could possibly be real. I would say that’s the kind of thing my Monster Kid likes- the Scooby Doo school of horror. Outside Over There is not that kind of story. It taps into something deep inside children, something that speaks to certain children and can really be unsettling to others, and certainly to adults (especially those looking for deeper meaning). It definitely wasn’t written with the same purpose in mind as the Goosebumps books. But both somehow fall into the wider category of scary books for kids.

If you are librarian or parent reading this, whether or not you’d classify this gorgeously illustrated and idiosyncratic Caldecott Honor winner as a scary book for kids doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you understand the kind of effect it may have on a reader, and plan to take time to talk about it when you put it in a child’s hands, if that child needs it. In my classes on children’s literature, I learned about many Sendak books: Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Chicken Soup With Rice… but not once (and I’ve taken multiple classes) was this book ever mentioned. And really, I think it should be.

Posted on August 24, 2012 by , 2 comments
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