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Book List: Schools for Peculiar Children

      

 

Miss Peregine’s Home for Peculiar Children hits theaters this week, and it will be interesting to see how it measures up to the book. It looks cool– click here for a link to the trailer. For me, the letters and the real photographs used, and the scrapbook-type format, were much of what made it intriguing, and I can’t imagine how that will translate to the screen. But the trailers look pretty awesome, so even if the movie doesn’t turn out to be just like the book, perhaps it will stand well on its own.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is far from the first book to be set in a school or home intended for particularly unusual children, though– some really excellent books for middle grade and teen readers exist in this category.  Here are a few you might check out.

 

Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan

Kit Gordy is attending an extremely exclusive, isolated, boarding school. Spoiler: it’s also haunted by ghosts who take possession of the students to create amazing works of art. Nothing could possibly go wrong here, right? This is a good one for tweens and middle schoolers, although, in my opinion, you don’t outgrow Lois Duncan.

 

 

The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls by Claire LeGrand

This is a disturbed fairy tale of a book. Victoria, a perfect 12 year old in every way, living in a picture-perfect community, has chosen just one friend, the very imperfect, messy, and musical Lawrence. When Lawrence disappears, Victoria goes on a search for him, uncovering some very unpleasant things. As more children disappear, and creepy creatures start invading, Victoria becomes even more determined to solve the mystery. She discovers that the orphanage across the street is actually a deeply disturbing, magically operated facility with the mission of turning all the imperfect children that have disappeared, including Lawrence, into identical, perfect children, Stepford-style. Mrs. Cavendish, the headmistress of the school, is truly diabolical, and the school itself is creepy, disquieting, and disorienting. This one is not for the faint of stomach, but people who liked Coraline  or the more nightmarish writing of Roald Dahl might very well like this. This is Gothic children’s horror at its best– highly recommended, but for no younger than age 10.

Contains: body horror, cannibalism, insect hordes, torture.

 

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Speaking of Roald Dahl, Matilda is surely every book lover’s favorite story of a peculiar child. While her school isn’t specifically for peculiar children, the people who work there certainly qualify as peculiar, especially the headmistress. You can’t help cheering for Matilda as she uses her unusual powers to defeat the sadistic Miss Trunchbull.

 

The Grounding of Group 6  by Julian F. Thompson

What’s a parent to do when a child repeatedly breaks the rules, gets thrown out of school again, or breaks that last straw? You send them to the school of last resort– Coldbrook County School– and then never worry about them again. That’s right, the school will take care of your problem child for you, in a permanent way, while the students are out on retreat in a wooded area full of sinkholes. Nothing supernatural in this book, all the horror is in the way humans treat each other.
I’d wait until high school to read this one– it’s got some harrowing moments. There’s also an implied sexual relationship between one of the students, in her late teens, and her “counselor”, who is in his twenties.

 

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

After the death of her mother, Gemma Doyle is sent from her home in India to a young ladies’ boarding school in Victorian England. Gemma has visions, and her unusual upbringing and uncanny knowledge mean a chilly reception from the other girls. Gemma learns to control the visions so she can visit magical realms. As she makes friends, she involves them in her journeys, but while the girls enjoy the power and escape they have in the realms, Gemma learns there is also a darker side. This is the first book in a trilogy: the other two books are Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing. Recommended for middle school and up.


Posted on September 28, 2016 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

Crossover Readers

A lot of publicity has gone to the newly recognized audience of “crossover readers,” an audience that only really emerged into the mainstream with the success of Harry Potter. Crossover readers returning to (or discovering) YA fiction are now an audience to be reckoned with, and some publishers are even experimenting with marketing to an audience that might be outgrowing YA books and wants titles more reflective of those in-between years that exist now from the time at which you finish high school and the time you truly declare your independence.

It’s great that this crossover audience is getting some attention. But what’s interesting is that as we talk about adults crossing over to a genre aimed at teens, there is a group aged 10-14 (or, depending on who you talk to, 8-12) that most people refer to as “tweens” (which is a term I hate). And that group is crossing over to read not just YA fiction targeted at a teen audience of ages 15 and up, but adult novels. This isn’t new. YA fiction didn’t always exist, and the books that did weren’t necessarily the ones that rang the bells of these kids, who are maybe not quite ready to leave the children’s section completely (there are some extremely awesome books for middle grade readers)but are also ready to strike out for the books their parents have hidden in a box in the back of their closet. Today when we think of middle grade students and horror, Goosebumps is what usually comes to mind, but oh my gosh, do you have any idea how many kids between 8 and 12 have read Stephen King’s IT? I asked a group of women on Facebook what book had scared them the most as a kid, and one of them said IT, which she had read at age 8 (when asked if she would give it to her kids at that age, she gave me a resounding NO). Erin Morgenstern, on NPR’s Risky Reads, wrote about reading IT first at age 12 (link here). If you read through the comments, you’ll see how young kids often are when they start reading Stephen King. One commenter said “I went straight for Stephen King in fifth grade.” Another commenter started reading King at age 9. I myself remember reading IT when I was about 12… so, you see, those older readers in the children’s section of the library, are getting their books from everywhere. Morgenstern’s article appeared as part of a series by NPR called PG-13: Risky Reads, in which authors discuss the books that, as teens, changed their lives. Some of these are definitely YA, some would be considered adult fiction, but, in spite of the title of this series, many of these books were also read by kids much younger than 13.

This NPR series reminds me a lot of a book by Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery, that I read some time ago– it actually has covered some of the same books. Shelf Discovery was compiled from a column at Jezebel called Fine Lines (archives are at the bottom of the article), where she (and some others) write about fiction read by this same age group–middle graders and teens– mostly titles girls in that age group would have read as they grew up in the 60s, 70s, and 80s Crossing over directly from children’s books to adult fiction at that time really isn’t all that uncommon, and that may be why there are so many challenges to books for children and teens. It’s nice to pretend that each kind of reader stays sorted into their little box, and it’s true that some will take the path we expect, or direct them on, or that marketers try to push them on. But really, each reader is different, every kid is different, and there is no sudden revolution, just a world of books and assorted related media that lead in a multitude of ways to discovering who you are as a reader, and who you are in life.

Am I saying that as librarians, educators, and parents, we should be handing our eight year olds Stephen King? No, absolutely not. But many of you probably remember reading books like Flowers in the Attic and The Grounding of Group Six before you were fifteen, and it’s good to remember that kids aren’t getting their books just from the library, and to remember what it was like to be that age and read the books in that box under the bed, when you look at and think about your own young reader. And, as an elementary school librarian recently asked me (to paraphrase) “They’re beyond Goosebumps-, and ready for something more– what can I give them next?”

Posted on February 1, 2013 by , Reply