Home » Posts tagged "scary books for kids" (Page 6)

Guest Post by Piers Torday: Climate Change Horror: Too Real For Middle Grade?

Piers Torday photo credit James Betts

 

     Piers Torday is the author of the middle grade novel The Last Wild, a unique book that deals with a topic usually dealt with in nonfiction with children– climate change. I asked Piers why he chose to write fiction on this topic for children instead of teens or adults, and he wrote this guest post for us here. Having just returned from vacation in Alaska, where my children actually held a chunk of melting glacier in their hands, this hits home for me. For them, it was a novelty and photo opportunity, although I found it to be pretty disturbing to see the pieces melting in front of me. Now that I’m home and have read what he has to say,  I think it’s very important for there to be books like his, that appeal to the imagination while creating an opportunity for awareness of this situation. Look for a review of The Last Wild to be posted shortly. Many thanks to Piers for sharing his thoughts with us.

CLIMATE CHANGE HORROR: TOO REAL FOR MIDDLE GRADE?

 

Of our many fears that can animate great stories, for me perhaps the greatest and the most palpable is our fear of the future. Wherever you stand on the politics, from dwindling (not to mention overheating) power supplies to water wars, housing space to food security, we all face major ecological challenges in the years ahead.

Most of those challenges, whether they come in the form of rising sea levels, increased immigration or extreme weather, are not predicted to come fully online until later in the century. It’s the middle grade readers of today who will have to face them.

The level of economic and political sacrifice required to avert major climate change make it nigh impossible for any decisive global unity on how to approach it. Certainly I don’t pretend to have the answers. What I do know for sure is that it’s going to take more than recycling the odd soda can to change anything.

The first problem with tackling this subject for middle grade readers is no one, especially children, likes being lectured to. Saving the planet, as the science currently stands, would require a level of sacrifice across the board that makes it hard for one person or country to stand up and tell another how to behave. I am writing this blog on a computer (and you’re probably reading it on one) which I use constantly for my work and am not really prepared to use much less. And I am just one of seven billion people on the planet who probably, given the chance, would all like to use a computer which they can turn on and off at will.

The second problem is that, unless you’re a polar bear on a shrinking ice cap, it still feels very abstract. Statistical modelling of carbon emissions and ocean acidity levels are hard to grasp at any age, and bar the odd unexpected hurricane or drought, most young people in the West don’t necessarily experience the effects of climate change in a tangible first hand way. Yet.

As a storyteller, I relish the challenge of animating these vital issues for the readers in whose hands the planet’s future resides.  First off, I can ask some questions. Do animals have an equal right to share this planet with us? What is greater within us, the desire for consumption or the ability to conserve?

Secondly, these abstract concepts are a gift for metaphor. In The Last Wild series I’m primarily using the animal characters – a heroic stag, a brave cockroach, some ditzy pigeons, a mini-spread of biodiversity – to represent the earth itself and through their different characters, provide some emotional heart to global issues that can feel dry and lacking in genuine, page-turning jeopardy.

Then, rather than scaremongering developing minds with totally bleak catastrophe scenarios (although there is no denying their power) in telling the story of my hero’s quest to save the last animals left alive on earth, what I can offer most of all is hope. Because, believe it or not, what I really feel is that human beings – through our curiosity, ingenuity and humanity – do have the ability to overcome those challenges and still make Earth a pleasant place to live for all creatures. If we choose.

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Piers Torday is the author of The Last Wild (Viking, $16.99). The sequel, The Dark Wild is due out next spring. You can follow him on Twitter @PiersTorday or catch up with him at www.pierstorday.co.uk.

Posted on June 28, 2014 by , Reply

We’re In The News!

Yes, really, we’re in the news! Okay, it’s just our community newspaper, but they wrote a really nice article about Monster Librarian. If you’re visiting here because you read it, thanks for stopping by, and please visit again, soon!  We may have a short summer hiatus next week, but then we will definitely be back on track.

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It’s true, we are plotting to get horror fiction into the hands of readers everywhere– Current in Carmel, June 3, 2014, p. 17

That lovely lady sitting between me and Dylan (we’re the ones holding hands) is Rhonda Rettig, who reviewed for us enthusiastically for several years before stepping down. Unfortunately, because this is a website, and because our reviewers are from all over the place, there aren’t very many photos of us together.

It’s exciting to see Monster Librarian get some recognition in our own community. Maybe this will even turn up some people who want to review children’s books for us– that’s always a huge challenge here. Yay!

 

 

Posted on June 4, 2014 by , Reply

Murder Most Foul: Violent Death in Children’s Literature

The Boston Globe just published an interview with Michelle Ann Abate, a professor at Ohio State University who has just published a book about the tradition of murder and violence in children’s literature (a really interesting take on the “scaring the children” theme). I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the interviewer edited the interview for publication, but for some reason both he and she come across as seeming surprised that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature, and she’s actually quoted as saying that “the story of violence and books for young readers hasn’t been told before”.

I have to say that I am surprised at the surprise that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature. It’s a frequent reason that books are banned (although racism, explicit sexual situations, and profanity currently top that). Going back in history, even after you progress past Grimm’s fairy tales, there’s no lack of violence and death. Andersen’s tales often end with death. “The Little Match Girl”, for instance, freezes to death on the street.

 

Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is a classic children’s book, with lovely illustrations. Here’s one for a story about a girl with matches who burns to death!

 

 

And let’s not forget the Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Poor Kate! Childhood used to be a much different creature than it is today, a point that Abate does make, and attitudes toward parenting tended toward the didactic and scaring kids into behaving. It is interesting to note, though, that Hoffman wrote the book to entertain his young child, and in spite of the terrifying stories and illustrations, there are a lot of adults who remember it as being funny when they were kids.  There’s a darkness inside children that a lot of grownups don’t want to admit is there.

“K is for Kate who was struck with an axe”

Moving on to more recent times, we have the parents of the kids in  Julian Thompson’s The Grounding of Group 6, who send their kids to a school that guarantees they’ll be permanently lost in the woods; the viciousness of the children in William Sleator’s House of Stairs; the matter-of-fact euthanasia of children and the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver;  the government approved murders of “extra” children in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden; the chilling account of the Holocaust in The Devil’s Arithmetic;  the supernatural terrors from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Death, and especially murder, can be scary in books, but nowhere near as scary as daily life. Processing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a lot more difficult for my kids than processing The Tailypo. 

Many people– librarians, critics, parents, academics– have considered the story of violence in children’s books. Nearly every year there’s at least one article about how children’s literature has gotten too dark. I would say that it’s an aspect that people either choose to avoid (it’s not difficult to avoid children’s books containing murders) or take for granted. When something like The Hunger Games or Goosebumps becomes massively popular, violence in children’s books comes into the spotlight, but even when it’s not in the spotlight, there are people who notice it, study it, and write about it. I think as transmedia platforms become more popular we’ll see more of this come to light, as books and visual media connect in more ways than ever, and this is definitely a topic worth paying attention to… but if the study of violence in children’s literature hasn’t been noticed before, it’s only because people didn’t want to see what was really there.

Posted on August 28, 2013 by , Reply
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