CCBC-Net Archives
The empire writes back...
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 20:53:37 -0500
Thank you, Mike, for writing about books and also about children in Australia and for writing with such genuine passion about your sense of the status of each. It's going to take me a while to digest all you said and expressed, and it's very clear that I don't know what I don't know. Not at all.
My first response is that beyond knowing more about each other, we need to know about the brave books, courageous stories - more than lessons - the books one cannot pigeonholed as topical books. Fiction featuring real kids, if possible. You referred to four specific books. I notice that "Boy Overboard" is available as a Puffin paperback - somewhere - and that "Girl Underground" has been reviewed by School Library Journal in the U.S. It seems that "Orphans of the Queen: is available
- somewhere - but "Walk in My Shoes" doesn't come up on Amazon.com at all.
Apparently the book community in more than one nation must move beyond what Mike calls "cozy self-congratulation." Teenaged readers deserve to be able to choose to read novels reflecting their own and other families as well. They deserve to be able to read novels showing kids their age in other nations or other circumstances coping and even surviving. I'm remembering the fine books by the Canadian writer Deborah Ellis who has reflected realities of the actual world in every single book she's written. I'm thinking about "The Mzungu Boy" by Meja Mwangi, a gripping & stark novel set in Kenya during the mid th century and published a few months ago in the U.S. by Groundwood.
Perhaps others from the U.S. or other nations will name books about which many of us would like to know. As I write that, I remember that so few nations of the world have the luxury of publishing their own books and all the books their kids do get to see - if they get to see any - are books imported from the U.K. or the U.S. or, or...
I can hardly bear to think about how much paper, ink and other resources are used in the production of ordinary books when there's such a need for distinctive writing, new voices, typically under- represented or misrepresented or even invisible people as characters in books for teenagers.
How far? That must be answered one book at a time, just as Erin wrote after reflecting upon Meg Rosoff's "how i live now." Erin wrote, "I hadn't even heard that it was set in contemporary times and there's a war in England, which is pretty key (!) to the story. I had a sort of shrugging, so-what response to the love relationship in the bigger context of the war story, and I would think teen readers would be more inclined to discuss the war and how it plays out than whether the relationship was acceptable or not. Sometimes, as the gatekeepers for children's literature, I think we lose sight of the whole truth of a story in the face of the question, "How far is too far?"
No, Mike, you didn't go too far.
Peace, Ginny
Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at education.wisc.edu
Received on Thu 23 Jun 2005 08:53:37 PM CDT
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 20:53:37 -0500
Thank you, Mike, for writing about books and also about children in Australia and for writing with such genuine passion about your sense of the status of each. It's going to take me a while to digest all you said and expressed, and it's very clear that I don't know what I don't know. Not at all.
My first response is that beyond knowing more about each other, we need to know about the brave books, courageous stories - more than lessons - the books one cannot pigeonholed as topical books. Fiction featuring real kids, if possible. You referred to four specific books. I notice that "Boy Overboard" is available as a Puffin paperback - somewhere - and that "Girl Underground" has been reviewed by School Library Journal in the U.S. It seems that "Orphans of the Queen: is available
- somewhere - but "Walk in My Shoes" doesn't come up on Amazon.com at all.
Apparently the book community in more than one nation must move beyond what Mike calls "cozy self-congratulation." Teenaged readers deserve to be able to choose to read novels reflecting their own and other families as well. They deserve to be able to read novels showing kids their age in other nations or other circumstances coping and even surviving. I'm remembering the fine books by the Canadian writer Deborah Ellis who has reflected realities of the actual world in every single book she's written. I'm thinking about "The Mzungu Boy" by Meja Mwangi, a gripping & stark novel set in Kenya during the mid th century and published a few months ago in the U.S. by Groundwood.
Perhaps others from the U.S. or other nations will name books about which many of us would like to know. As I write that, I remember that so few nations of the world have the luxury of publishing their own books and all the books their kids do get to see - if they get to see any - are books imported from the U.K. or the U.S. or, or...
I can hardly bear to think about how much paper, ink and other resources are used in the production of ordinary books when there's such a need for distinctive writing, new voices, typically under- represented or misrepresented or even invisible people as characters in books for teenagers.
How far? That must be answered one book at a time, just as Erin wrote after reflecting upon Meg Rosoff's "how i live now." Erin wrote, "I hadn't even heard that it was set in contemporary times and there's a war in England, which is pretty key (!) to the story. I had a sort of shrugging, so-what response to the love relationship in the bigger context of the war story, and I would think teen readers would be more inclined to discuss the war and how it plays out than whether the relationship was acceptable or not. Sometimes, as the gatekeepers for children's literature, I think we lose sight of the whole truth of a story in the face of the question, "How far is too far?"
No, Mike, you didn't go too far.
Peace, Ginny
Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at education.wisc.edu
Received on Thu 23 Jun 2005 08:53:37 PM CDT
