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Lois Lowry
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From: Ginny Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 20:53:00 -600
Although we did not get as far as we thought we might in discussing Lois Lowry's books Number the Stars and The Giver, each of your comments and questions was helpful in one way or another to a continuing consideration of these two works. I hope you were stimulated to reflect a bit on your own or with colleagues about one or both of these two very discussible books.
I replied to my December house guest's question - just as you did - that most of the readers of Number the Stars are so young that they very likely haven't heard of the Holocaust, that within it they are shown all they need to know to follow the story. From that point on they can, if they wish, go on to find out more. Children whose only brush with the Holocaust is the book Number the Stars will realize later - perhaps when reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl - that Number the Stars did not lie to them when they were younger.
Perhaps you know Lois Lowry as a skilled, versatile writer of fine realistic novels set with contemporary settings. I particularly admire Rabble Starkey (1987), and I've always intended to re-read her first novel A Summer to Die (1977) which was so well received twenty years ago. Someday.
Now as we arrive at the end of January, I will share a statement Lois Lowry wrote and quoted herself when she spoke in Madison in October, 1996. The statement is one distributed widely by her publisher. If you share this statement with others, I urge you to reprint it in its entirety:
In the beginning, in my early years as a writer for young people, I occasionally received letters from people (parents, teachers, sometimes a child) who wondered why I had used a "bad word" in a book. I always wrote back very diligently, explaining that an author tries to reflect reality, and so book characters have to speak the way real people would speak; it didn't mean, I always explained, that the reader should speak that way, or that the author does.
Although as a new author I probably had not thought such things through very carefully, I began, after a few books, to consider each
"bad word" that appeared from my typewriter, later from my word processor, and to question whether it needed to be there. After all, I didn't want or need to spend my time answering those questions in letters from readers.
Sometimes, on reflection, I decided the word or phrase wasn't necessary, and I took it out. Other times I decided that it belonged there, and there it stayed. In Number the Stars, for example, I knew I would get an occasional outraged or concerned letter about the use of the adjective "damn" in a book whose audience would be sometimes as young as eight years old. And I did receive those letters. But the word "damn," spoken by an adult Danish citizen, modified "Nazis" and referred to the thugs who had occupied his country and were threatening the lives of countless civilians. I was willing to defend my use of the word in a book for children because of the context.
When I wrote The Giver, it contained no so?lled "bad words." There was no reason that it should. It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic and Utopian society which had managed to do away with all the things that threaten us today. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of The Giver; there was also carefull attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.
The reaction to the book was startling. It was startling in the number of letters and responses I received almost immediately, but it was even more startling in the degree of differences in the responses.
A Trappist monk wrote from his monastery that he and his brothers were reading the book as a Christian metaphor and finding it profoundly significant as a message of redemption.
At about the same time, a parent in California demanded that it be taken off the library shelves of her child's school because of its immorality.
A private school in Michigan made it required reading not only for all the upper-school students, but for their parents.
At the same time, a teacher wrote to me that the Newbery committee should be chastised for their awarding the 1994 medal to a sensationalistic piece of trash.
The children of Belgium and France chose the book, in translation, as their favorite of the year.
A parent wrote to me that I should be ashamed for exposing children to "messy data."
What's wrong with this picture? I found myself thinking.
I went back and re-read the book myself. I found myself thinking whether these disparate people were in fact all responding to the same thing: whether there was actually a theme in the book which people found either uplifting or terrifying, or maybe both.
And I discovered that it was the concept of choice.
The truth is, this is a pretty horrifying world these days, and especially to parents of growing children. I have two grandchildren myself and I shudder at the decisions they will face in the not-too-distant future.
The Giver is about a world where those decisions are made for them. It seems very safe and comfortable, and I bet a lot of parents
- later to object and censor - liked the book until they were two thirds of the way through it.
Then it got scary. It got scary - and they decided to take it away from their own kids - because it turned out that it wasn't safe and comfy to live in a world where adhering to rigid rules is the norm. It turned out, in the book, that such a world is very, very dangerous; and that people have to learn to make their own choices.
I sympathize with the fear that makes some parents not want that to be true.
But I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make the right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world. Pretending that there are no choices to be made - reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice - is a prescription for disaster for the young.
Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of The Giver: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all."
- - - Lois Lowry (no date)
My apologies for typos in this statement.
Allow me to suggest that you will find even more upon which to reflect if you read Ms. Lowry's Newbery Award acceptance speeches. Like other Newbery and Caldecott acceptance speeches are published annually, her speeches were published in two journals: 1) The Horn Book (NTS: July/August 1990 and TG: July/August 1994); and 2) Journal of Youth Services in Libraries (NTS Summer 1990 and TG Summer 1994).
If you want to respond to the above statement or anything else concerning Ms. Lowry's books, please do. We'd love to "go around the room" and - as someone said to me last week "for the good of the order" - hear from everyone in CCBC-NET. At the least, we'd love to hear from more of you. What are you thinking about right now after reading the above statement, or the speeches, or any of Ms. Lowry's books? You don't need to sound profound or say something new. What would you say if we were able to divide into small groups and respond? Hmmmm??? ... Ginny
****************************** Ginny Moore Kruse (gmkruse at ccbc.soemadison.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) A Library of the School of Education University of Wisconsin - Madison 4290 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St. Madison, WI 53706 USA
Received on Fri 31 Jan 1997 08:53:00 PM CST
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 20:53:00 -600
Although we did not get as far as we thought we might in discussing Lois Lowry's books Number the Stars and The Giver, each of your comments and questions was helpful in one way or another to a continuing consideration of these two works. I hope you were stimulated to reflect a bit on your own or with colleagues about one or both of these two very discussible books.
I replied to my December house guest's question - just as you did - that most of the readers of Number the Stars are so young that they very likely haven't heard of the Holocaust, that within it they are shown all they need to know to follow the story. From that point on they can, if they wish, go on to find out more. Children whose only brush with the Holocaust is the book Number the Stars will realize later - perhaps when reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl - that Number the Stars did not lie to them when they were younger.
Perhaps you know Lois Lowry as a skilled, versatile writer of fine realistic novels set with contemporary settings. I particularly admire Rabble Starkey (1987), and I've always intended to re-read her first novel A Summer to Die (1977) which was so well received twenty years ago. Someday.
Now as we arrive at the end of January, I will share a statement Lois Lowry wrote and quoted herself when she spoke in Madison in October, 1996. The statement is one distributed widely by her publisher. If you share this statement with others, I urge you to reprint it in its entirety:
In the beginning, in my early years as a writer for young people, I occasionally received letters from people (parents, teachers, sometimes a child) who wondered why I had used a "bad word" in a book. I always wrote back very diligently, explaining that an author tries to reflect reality, and so book characters have to speak the way real people would speak; it didn't mean, I always explained, that the reader should speak that way, or that the author does.
Although as a new author I probably had not thought such things through very carefully, I began, after a few books, to consider each
"bad word" that appeared from my typewriter, later from my word processor, and to question whether it needed to be there. After all, I didn't want or need to spend my time answering those questions in letters from readers.
Sometimes, on reflection, I decided the word or phrase wasn't necessary, and I took it out. Other times I decided that it belonged there, and there it stayed. In Number the Stars, for example, I knew I would get an occasional outraged or concerned letter about the use of the adjective "damn" in a book whose audience would be sometimes as young as eight years old. And I did receive those letters. But the word "damn," spoken by an adult Danish citizen, modified "Nazis" and referred to the thugs who had occupied his country and were threatening the lives of countless civilians. I was willing to defend my use of the word in a book for children because of the context.
When I wrote The Giver, it contained no so?lled "bad words." There was no reason that it should. It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic and Utopian society which had managed to do away with all the things that threaten us today. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of The Giver; there was also carefull attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.
The reaction to the book was startling. It was startling in the number of letters and responses I received almost immediately, but it was even more startling in the degree of differences in the responses.
A Trappist monk wrote from his monastery that he and his brothers were reading the book as a Christian metaphor and finding it profoundly significant as a message of redemption.
At about the same time, a parent in California demanded that it be taken off the library shelves of her child's school because of its immorality.
A private school in Michigan made it required reading not only for all the upper-school students, but for their parents.
At the same time, a teacher wrote to me that the Newbery committee should be chastised for their awarding the 1994 medal to a sensationalistic piece of trash.
The children of Belgium and France chose the book, in translation, as their favorite of the year.
A parent wrote to me that I should be ashamed for exposing children to "messy data."
What's wrong with this picture? I found myself thinking.
I went back and re-read the book myself. I found myself thinking whether these disparate people were in fact all responding to the same thing: whether there was actually a theme in the book which people found either uplifting or terrifying, or maybe both.
And I discovered that it was the concept of choice.
The truth is, this is a pretty horrifying world these days, and especially to parents of growing children. I have two grandchildren myself and I shudder at the decisions they will face in the not-too-distant future.
The Giver is about a world where those decisions are made for them. It seems very safe and comfortable, and I bet a lot of parents
- later to object and censor - liked the book until they were two thirds of the way through it.
Then it got scary. It got scary - and they decided to take it away from their own kids - because it turned out that it wasn't safe and comfy to live in a world where adhering to rigid rules is the norm. It turned out, in the book, that such a world is very, very dangerous; and that people have to learn to make their own choices.
I sympathize with the fear that makes some parents not want that to be true.
But I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make the right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world. Pretending that there are no choices to be made - reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice - is a prescription for disaster for the young.
Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of The Giver: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all."
- - - Lois Lowry (no date)
My apologies for typos in this statement.
Allow me to suggest that you will find even more upon which to reflect if you read Ms. Lowry's Newbery Award acceptance speeches. Like other Newbery and Caldecott acceptance speeches are published annually, her speeches were published in two journals: 1) The Horn Book (NTS: July/August 1990 and TG: July/August 1994); and 2) Journal of Youth Services in Libraries (NTS Summer 1990 and TG Summer 1994).
If you want to respond to the above statement or anything else concerning Ms. Lowry's books, please do. We'd love to "go around the room" and - as someone said to me last week "for the good of the order" - hear from everyone in CCBC-NET. At the least, we'd love to hear from more of you. What are you thinking about right now after reading the above statement, or the speeches, or any of Ms. Lowry's books? You don't need to sound profound or say something new. What would you say if we were able to divide into small groups and respond? Hmmmm??? ... Ginny
****************************** Ginny Moore Kruse (gmkruse at ccbc.soemadison.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) A Library of the School of Education University of Wisconsin - Madison 4290 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St. Madison, WI 53706 USA
Received on Fri 31 Jan 1997 08:53:00 PM CST
