From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Sat, 08 May 2004 09:56:48 -0400

Barbara Kerley asked, "....whether we have any specific responsibilities to our young readers when we write a fictionalized story about a real historical person." I think this is a very important question. And it is one where the border between adult and children's books and their readers becomes, it seems to me, very large. I can think of all sorts of wonderful adult fiction where writers play with real people in history with impunity. I doubt Don Delillo and Peter Carey, for example, thought much if at all about whether their readers needed to get the real story about Oswald and Kelly from their books. However, the use of historical fiction in schools does seem to put pressure on writers for children to indeed consider the possibility that their works will be use to help children learn about the historical people and topics therein. How responsible do they have to be then?

The current Horn Book special issue on Borderlands has many wonderful articles related to the border between children and adults. Perry Nodelman in "Reading Across the Border" points out that short of losing our memories, we adults cannot read books for children as do children. Thus, while we former children may think back matter and author notes are critical parts of the work, current children may well not. I'm with Jonathan in observing that 99% of the children I teach do not read any of it unless forced to. You can have your ideal child reader be one who reads every word, but most are going to begin at the beginning and go on till they get to the end (to paraphrase Lewis Carroll). And their beginnings and ends do not include stuff about the story.

We adults, as Perry notes, also KNOW a heck of a lot more than children. We know about Oswald before reading Delillo's Libra. I wonder if we too often make assumptions about what children know and bring to their book readings. Either we think they know less or we think they know more. Either way, Barbara's question becomes pretty significant. The learning specialist who works in my classroom is always horrified when my students look at us blankly when we ask them about some sort of basic American history question, say what the 4th of July signifies. I reminder her that even if they were told what it meant more than once in the past, they had no reason to remember it. But I do think that book creators sometimes make similar assumptions about what child readers bring to their reading of a particular book.

I've read several works of historical fiction where facts have been substantively altered for very particular reasons. In one case the author made the subject several decades younger during the significant events of the story than was actually the case. That is, the subject was in middle age when they occurred, but the author made her a young adult in order, I assume, to help the child readers better relate to her. In another case the book creators had the historical figure do something significant that she did not really do, the sort of action by which she is known today. This was done, I understand, to present her as a more active agent for child readers. The books are both fiction, but I suspect child readers, knowing that they are about real historical people, assume all that happened in them is true.

As someone attempting to write a book for children myself about a real historical person, I know firsthand how hard it is. The border is not only between adult and child readers, but between adult and child expectations. Why are we (child or adult) reading this book? What do we want from it? A story that we lose ourselves in? A way to learn about a particular historical time? Both? Whew....it is a tightrope of a border with nary a net below!

Monica




Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Sat 08 May 2004 08:56:48 AM CDT