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October is Bullying Prevention Month: Dear Bully and YA Fiction Book List on Bullying

October has so much going on in it that it’s easy to lose track of Bullying Prevention Month, but I thought I’d take a minute to write about it here.

This month one of the Kindle books for $2.99 or less is Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories. Dear Bully is a collection of stories and essays by seventy children’s and young adult authors (mostly YA) in which they share their experiences with bullying– as victim, bystander, or bully. And their essays cover a myriad of bullying situations, some of which maybe you or I might not have considered, because they don’t exactly fit the stereotypical situation. There are stories of kids who were physically and verbally attacked by the school bully, or tormented by rumors and names spread by their classmates. There are stories of teens who were isolated and emotionally drained by boyfriends, manipulated by fair weather friends, joined in with the school bully either for praise or out of fear, were bystanders, acted thoughtlessly, abandoned or were abandoned by friends for no apparent reason, and bullied other kids. There are stories of heartbreak, failure, regret, of rising above, of finding true friends, of surviving and, eventually, thriving, of wanting to change the way we treat each other.

Many of the writers who participated in this project talked about how it shaped them into writers.  Among the essays are a few by writers identified with the horror genre that I found really interesting. The first, by R.L. Stine, author of the scary (and funny) Goosebumps books, talks about how he was chased and physically bullied by much older kids for a long time– and one day dragged by them to a supposedly haunted house and forced  to spend the night… and how he finally turned the tables on them. In his story he writes about how the sheer panic he felt in being chased by these bullies every day is something he has never forgotten and drives his writing of the Goosebumps books. In interviews, Stine has maintained that nothing scares him, so in addition to being a powerful piece of writing  it was fascinating to get this glimpse into his past.

Dan Waters, author of the Generation Dead books, wrote his story from the perspective of an author and adult who received a powerful impression of the awfulness of  teens bullying other teens and decided to address it in his writing (adding a few zombies into the mix) Some of this is information he’s shared before– we interviewed him several years ago and he talked about this a little– but it says a lot about the state of the world that bullying has reached such levels that even just a television special could inspire him to address it by writing  horror fiction.

There are other fantastic essays in Dear Bully, and even if you’re too late to get your own copy at Amazon, I hope you’ll look for it at the library.  Here’s a list of  YA fiction(some older titles, and some current) that address some of these themes. Some don’t necessarily fall into the category of horror, but all of them address bullying and intimidation and their consequences in some way:

 

YA Fiction with Bullying Themes

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck (reviewed here)

Burn for Burn by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian (reviewed here)

Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan

Shine by Lauren Myracle

ghostgirl by Tonya Hurley

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters (reviewed here)

Are You In The House Alone? by Richard Peck (reviewed here)

Hannah’s Story: Vampire Love Never Dies by Giulietta Maria Spudich (reviewed here)

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Posted on October 31, 2012 by , Reply

What Banned Books Week Really Means

It’s kind of interesting to look at the opinions, or lack thereof, of the authors of banned books on censorship. R.L Stine, author of the Goosebumps series and many, many other books both scary and funny, doesn’t seem to have much to say. The Goosebumps series was #15 on the list 100 Most Banned/Challenged Books,1990-1999, and was still in the top 100 for the list for 2000-2009, and just last year was challenged in Kirbyville, Texas. But in interviews, he’s rarely asked about censorship of his books, and the most I could find was a comment from him from a chat on CNN that attempting to ban the Harry Potter books was “silly”. Maybe when you’ve written as many books as he has, one person, or school, or library, taking one book from a series with 100+ titles seems pretty insignificant (I’d love to really know what he thinks).

Stephen King, whose book Cujo has been challenged and banned in the past, has made it clear that he opposes book banning, but he’s also said that he doesn’t see it as a major issue. A writer writes, and if he’s defending his books, then he’s not writing. I get that, but he also says he believes a defense should be mounted– but by whom? In a speech he gave titled ” I Want To Be Typhoid Stevie” in 1997 he said that when his books are challenged or banned, he tells kids this:

Don’t get mad, get even… Run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.

His philosophy hasn’t really changed too much. I don’t totally agree with him– I think it’s important for kids to stand up for their right to read, and while you certainly can find at least some of his books there (he’s written so many), not everyone has easy access to a library or bookstore where they can easily acquire a challenged or banned book, or owns an ereader (you can now buy his books online, and some of them are only available as ebooks). Maybe if you tear the house apart you’ll find that your dad has a secret stash (which is how I first tripped over King’s books). Or maybe not. If he doesn’t protest challenges to his books, and kids don’t, who in a divided community will provide that defense? A school librarian may be an amazing advocate who carries the day… but it scares me just to think about doing it myself.

But, he points out, and I think this is a point well taken, in the United States, we all have the right to protest a challenge to a book, or a book banning, to give copies of a banned book away openly (as the Kurt Vonnegut Library did in a recent controversy over Slaughterhouse-Five), or to acquire a banned book without persecution. There are parts of the world where that isn’t possible, and times in history when it has been vigorously enforced. Even though we aren’t living in one of those places, or through one of those times, and even though banning books is a serious issue here, he notes in a 1992 essay:

There are places in the world where the powers that be ban the author as well as the author’s works when the subject matter or mode of expression displeases said powers. Look at Salman Rushdie, now living under a death sentence, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a prison camp for calling Josef Stalin “the boss” and had to run for the west to avoid another stay after he won the Nobel Prize for “The Gulag Archipelago.”

I discovered that Banned Books Week inspires defenders of human rights, who fight for freedom of speech and freedom of expression for writers and journalists who are witnesses to oppression and who live in or write about these places. In America, our right to stand up for the freedom to read resonates throughout the world. In the world of school librarianship, connectedness, collaboration, and social justice are essential concepts to share. Something for all of us to think about is the way Banned Books Week affects not just individual challenges here, but human rights around the world, and the courage to fight for freedom of expression in the face of danger. If you visit our Pinterest board on Banned Books, I shared links there to some organizations that contribute to continuing that fight, and I hope that you’ll check them out. And many thanks to Mr. King to providing quite a bit of food for thought.

 

Posted on September 30, 2012 by , Reply

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
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