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Banned Books Week: Children’s Books and the End of Innocence

 

Something I see a lot in arguments about whether kids should have access to a particular book is that, as parents and guardians of children, we want to protect their innocence. If you live in a middle class family that was relatively intact, in an area where everyone seemed to be pretty much like you, controlling your kids’ reading might help to preserve that innocence for a while, but if you take a closer look at the individual families there, what you see is that under the surface, children have already faced, or learned about, some pretty terrible things. Even at school, they’ve faced lockdown drills, practice for what to do if the school is invaded by a shooter. The terrible things we live among are so commonplace, and many of us are so numb to them, that it may be difficult for adults to realize how affected some of our kids really are.

I was in the library with my daughter, who is a huge fan of the 43 Old Cemetery Road books and was looking for something similar. The librarian kept making suggestions and asking questions: is this one too dark? Are you looking for something scary, or something funny, or both? I can’t remember what it was the librarian pulled off the shelf that I looked at and said “I think that one might be too dark and scary for her”. My daughter put her hands on her hips, looked at me with exasperation, and said “Mom, my dad died. Nothing is sadder or scarier than that”.  Okay, then. Keeping kids away from the media doesn’t preserve their innocence. Fiction is a safer place than fact. And let me tell you, there is a lot of scary stuff, and a lot of death, in children’s fiction. Even Little Women spends a lot of time on death.

Children’s writing has gotten a lot edgier today, so I can see where some of the discomfort comes from, but we are living in an uncomfortable world. It is a scary place. We can respect that our kids are dealing with a lot of the same things that make the world a scary place for us, and help them choose the reading material they want, or maybe even need, in hopes that even scary books will give them a space in their lives for hope.

If a kid doesn’t think he’s ready to read a scary book, there’s time yet. And certainly there are choices that need to be made about what’s developmentally appropriate: for instance, most Holocaust fiction is not recommended for elementary students (the one exception I can think of is The Devil’s Arithmetic) but if you take your kids to The Sound of Music, you are going to have to come up with a reasonable explanation of who the Nazis were. But that means having dialogue with your child about that, not making choices for him or others to protect his innocence. For a lot of kids, that innocence just isn’t there anymore. Taking books out of their hands can’t save that. Talking to kids about them can help a lot.

For a partial list of banned children’s books, from picture books through Young Adult, go here.

Posted on October 2, 2015 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: In Praise of Scribbling Women (and Louisa May Alcott)!

It’s Women in Horror Month, that time of year when we recognize the amazing women who celebrate and create the horror genre. When it comes to horror fiction, there don’t seem to be very many names that appear in the past. Of course, there’s always Mary Shelley, but, while she was exceptional in many ways, she certainly wasn’t the only woman of her time writing gothic and horror stories .

Anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t read Little Women. Here’s Jo March, the most unconventional of the four March sisters, burning up with her desire to write:

Every few weeks she would shut herself up into her room, put on her scribbling suit, and “fall into a vortex,” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Jo’s family is much more supportive of her than most families were: writing was not only considered unsuitable for women, but unhealthy (and that’s literal– if you want to read a seriously twisted horror story, try Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi-autobiographical story “The Yellow Wallpaper”). But at the same time, the reality of daily life meant that women somehow had to support their families, and many of them did it by writing (KC Redding-Gonzales has written about it here).  The writing that earned a steady paycheck, though, was pulp fiction for magazines and newspapers– “sensational stories” that gave their readers thrills, chills, romance, and murder. So that’s what Jo does. Her publisher “rejected any but thrilling tales” so that’s what she wrote, but with no name attached. Little Women‘s author, Louisa May Alcott, supported her family by writing sensational stories for ten years under a pen name, including a novel, A Long and Fatal Love Chase. But in the end, conventional Louisa won out, and, as in Little Women, where Jo finally gives up her writing, she stopped (this review from Stephen King has more on Louisa).

Alcott, Gilman, and the fictional Jo are just three examples from that time, though (even Frankenstein was first published under a pseudonym)– and we can’t know, really, how many women supplied horror, romance, suspense, ghost stories, and gothic fiction for pulp magazines, newspapers, and even three volume novels, since so many of them, like Jo, left their work unsigned, or like Alcott, wrote under a pen name. They did it because they loved writing, or needed money, or both, and whether they were proud of their work or ashamed of it, these scribbling women shaped popular culture. Many of them may be nameless, but they shouldn’t be forgotten.

Posted on February 7, 2013 by , Reply

Written In Blood

I loved The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian so much that I gave it away to someone I thought would love it just as much. I guess she did, because she never returned it. Sherman Alexie is just that good. Honestly, I couldn’t believe Meghan Cox Gurdon could possibly be calling his work depraved. It’s a book that opens eyes- not one that turns out the light.

I am thrilled that he wrote a response to the Wall Street Journal, in their Speakeasy blog, titled “Why The Best Kids’ Books Are Written In Blood”. And I think what he said about his personal experience with books is so important to the way adults think about teens’ reading. Their experiences, and their reading, are often multidimensional. No one made me follow up Inherit the Wind with Ira Stone’s thick biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Reading Carrie didn’t stop me from reading Little Women. It doesn’t have to be an either/or kind of situation. And this is what Alexie expresses in a very personal way. He writes,

“As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life”.

I know that’s an awfully long quote, but I think his words here are so important. In her book Don’t Tell The Grownups, Alison Lurie writes about how the very nature of important children’s books is subversive. Those books aren’t written to make grownups feel comfortable. They continue to be important because children need to find within themselves what makes grownups uncomfortable, and those books are where they discover how to live in a world in which they have very little control.

Thank you, Mr. Alexie, for speaking up.

Posted on June 11, 2011 by , Reply