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A Tribute to E.L. Konigsburg

I was saddened to hear of the death of the great children’s and YA novelist, E.L. Konigsburg. While she’s probably best known for her Newbery Award winning novel From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, she also wrote many other powerful novels, and she is the only author to have won both a Newbery Award and a Newbery Honor (for Jennifer, Hecate, William McKinley, Macbeth, and Me, Elizabeth) in the same year (1968). She also won a Newbery for The View from Saturday in 1997.  I discovered and read her books when I was in elementary school and junior high and never really stopped, and as both a children’s librarian and a reader, I’ve never truly put them away again.

I scraped together my pennies to buy (George), the story of a highly gifted child with an imaginary friend– who may or may not really be imaginary. I journeyed to an 800 number with the buttoned-up Maximilian, on his erratic travels across the country with his father (and a camel). I discovered the imperfect life and loves of Eleanor of Aquitaine in A Proud Taste of Scarlet and Miniver. I wondered who the mysterious Caroline really was in Father’s Arcane Daughter.

Years later, the mystery and horror at the heart of Silent to the Bone mesmerized me (it is a horrifying enough story that we’ve reviewed it here). Margaret, a minor character in that book, is the hero in The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, a story of hope, love, and change. Of course, the award winners are wonderful books as well, and From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is the one everyone remembers, but with stories that ranged from quirky, funny, and fantastic to touching, thoughtful, mysterious, and even terrifying (sometimes in the same book), there were many choices.

I’m thankful for every time I read something she had written and felt that click that said “that’s me!” For every time she introduced me to someone who lived life in a very different way, or made an escape possible for me without my having to run off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to change my life. Even if E.L. Konigsburg isn’t an author who touched your life, if you are a book lover (and you probably are, if you’re reading this) there probably is an author who did. Today is a good day to remember the door to books that author opened to you.

Help a Reader Out: Wolf Girl in Love

A mystery keyword searcher asks:

What is the book called about a girl being a wolf and falling in love with a human?

Ah, an oldie but goodie. It’s Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause, and that is an exact description of the plot.

Here are a couple of other YA werewolfy love stories, just in case you need another fix. Wolves of Mercy Falls, yada yada. There are other ones, you know!

Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce
Red by Kait Nolan
Never Cry Werewolf by Heather Davis
Princess of the Silver Woods by Jessica Day George
Raised by Wolves by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Red Moon Rising by Peter Moore
Red Rider’s Hood by Neal Shusterman

 

Enjoy!

 

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?”