Children’s Literature

More Thoughts

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Mar 22, 2019 in Children's Literature, MeToo, Politics, Race, Writing Process | 0 comments

I continue musing about the face of Blood Heir and A Place for Wolves, two YA novels on the verge of publication cancelled after online outrage. I offered up a few thoughts about this last week, but want to add some more.

In her discussion of morality clauses (also a hot button topic in publishing lately), Judith Shulevitz points out that writers of color and women and LBGTQ writers are most vulnerable to online outrage, most easily targeted and most viciously attacked. The same issue is at play here. It’s ironic and I don’t think it’s coincidental that the two most high-profile cases of books being withdrawn pre-publication involve two writers of color, one of them an immigrant, one of them gay. When we use the level of outrage to judge whether books should be released, I predict that women and minorities will see their books cancelled first. Supression always hits the most vulnerable the hardest.

You may ask, what about own voices–authors, especially those from marginalized communities, writing directly about their own experiences? Important. Vital. I am all for it. We need black people writing about the African American experience, we need gay people writing about growing up LBGTQ, we need immigrants writing about immigration. Please do so. I am so eager to read what you write. But please use own voices to open up the marketplace of ideas, not to shut it down.

And finally, as writers and as human being, we will blow it sometimes. I’m sorry about that, but we’re flawed and it’s inevitable. Blowing it does not necessarily mean that a book should be cancelled, because that negates the possibility of such a book being flawed but valuable. Can The Merchant of Venice be, perhaps, a work that is disturbing for its anti-Semitism and still interesting for its cry of universal humanity? Does Dorothy L. Sayer’s casual racism mean I can’t remain fascinated by her intimate, heartfelt longing for a companionate marriage of equals between a man and a woman? Isn’t Huckleberry Finn both a sharp, satiric look at the American experience and a tender examination of a cross-racial friendship and an uncomfortable expression of bone-deep racism? Can’t we are as readers be trusted–or even allowed–to see all the sides?

Let Readers Judge

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Mar 15, 2019 in Children's Literature, Editing, Politics, Race, Reviews | 0 comments

Two YA books have been cancelled recently because of an online storm that accused them and their authors of bias. Amelie Wen Zhao’s Blood Heir was pulled from shelves because some readers of the pre-release materials felt she depicted slavery insensitively–and because she is an Asian American immigrant writing about slavery. Kosoko Jackson asked that his novel, A Place for Wolves, be pulled from publication after some online accusations of insensitivity to Muslims–and because he is a gay American black man writing a novel set during the Kosovan civil war.

I know of at least one other book which was cancelled before publication because the race of the writer did not coincide with the race of the main character. There are probably others.

I have not read any of these books. I cannot say with conviction whether the writers are guilty of bias, insensitivity, or just plain bad writing.

Here’s the thing–most of the people attacking these writers online have not read the books either. Because they have not been released. And now they never will be.

Not every book that makes it past an editorial acquisition committee and reviewers’ eagle eyes is a good book. Some are poorly written, some traffic in stereotypes, some reveal biased judgment or a lack of empathy. You know what should happen to those book? They should fail.

They should go unsold and go out of print because they have not connected with readers. But they should not be yanked off the shelves because a pre-publication online mob has judged them impure or has decided that X writer cannot write about Y characters or Z setting.

Books are not finished until they connect with their readers. A reader takes in a book, characters and plot and setting and tone and vision and emotional impact. The book as a whole collides with and absorbs the reader’s mindset and feelings and memories and preferences and then, only once that has happened, do you have a book. A complete book. A book that can actually be judged as good, bad, interesting but flawed, or a waste of paper or pixels.

Pulling books off the shelves before they get released short-circuits this process. It means books will forever be judged on an anonymous tweet or a scrap of quotation. It means books are being condemned while they are still half finished.

This is not the way to go about publishing, reviewing, or writing books. We can’t publish by tweet. (We can’t govern that way either.)

All These Orphans

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Jan 17, 2019 in Children's Literature | 0 comments

A dog is so much better than a parent.

My daughter’s elementary school is putting on a production of Annie this year. Several of her classmates are going to be in it. They’re excited.

I like the catchy tunes as much as the next person, but I don’t care for all the stereotypes about adoption. In general, adoptive parents (and I am one) don’t want their kids to get the idea that “nobody cares for you a smidge / when you’re in an orphanage.” My daughter and I watched the film a few weeks ago so she’d be prepared. She didn’t mind Mrs. Hannigan as much as I do, although she wasn’t a fan of Punjab the Indian manservant.

It made me think a bit more about all the orphans of children’s literature.

Annie, of course. Anne of Green Gables. (Don’t name your daughter Ann or Anne, folks–there’s some kind of bad cosmic influence there.) James (of Giant Peach fame). Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella (okay, their fathers aren’t dead but they might as well be.) Harry Potter, of course. Of course. Gilly Hopkins. Dicey Tillerman.

Part of it is simple–if you don’t kill the parents or otherwise remove them from the picture, the action of the book takes a severe hit. Generally, parents are supposed to keep their kids safe, and safe is the opposite of dramatic. If you don’t want to kill the parents off, another good trick is to send the kids away from them–to boarding school (see anything by Enid Blyton) or summer camp (hello, Percy Jackson) or away from London during the Blitz (Peter, Susan Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie). Or just make the parents useless, of course–that worked for Jane and Michael Banks. Or have the mother dead and the father lost at sea or ruling a cannibal island (hi, Pippi Longstocking). But whatever you do, just don’t let the parents be around.

(In my own books, I’ve got two orphans–Kata of Deadly Flowers and Deadly Wish and Rosalind of The Secret of the Rose. Plus, Mella of Dragon’s Egg ditches her parents early on.)

But even allowing for the fact that it’s a very useful plot device, there are an awful lot of orphans.

I think parents don’t really belong in kids’ books at all. Books are the places kids go to be free. To be independent. To become themselves. To shake off their parents and all our rules and plans for our lives and become who they really are. Maybe every book is a rehearsal for the day they’re off to college or a road trip or the army or their first jobs and their very own apartments, when they can finally stay up as late as they want and eat ice cream for dinner. And we can’t stop them.

They want us to go away–not to die, not really, but to vanish for a while. To rule a cannibal island or stay home while bombs rain down upon us while they explore magical wardrobes or float away on balloons under the eye of magnificently indifferent nannies. We want to take care of them forever. They want to stop being taken care of at all.

What a good thing we’ve got literature, to let them be free of us while still safe and cozy on the couch. Frankly, it makes me feel a little better about Annie.