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| Hearsay: |
A former UK children’s laureate is calling on authors to make children’s lit nicer. No, really! Honestly, she’s totally saying that. I don’t want to get all esoteric here in my rebuttal and make this an academic argument with too fine a point on it, but isn’t this THE MOST RETARDED THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD?
Too often they tended to veer towards bleak “realism” that had gone “too far”, which gave youngsters little hope and little aspiration, the best selling author commented.
While Fine insisted that she was not advocating a return to books with a “Blyton-ish view of things”, she said she was worried about the effects that so many downbeat stories were having on children.
Speaking at an event organised by Children in Scotland, called Compelling Novels, Vulnerable Children, she told The Times: “In the Fifties, when a strong child was dealing with difficult circumstances, there was always a rescue at the end of the book and it was always a middle-class rescue.
“The child would win a scholarship to Rodean or something, and go on to do very well. That was felt to be unrealistic and so there was a move away from that. Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism.
“But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children. I am not sure that we are opening doors for children who read these books, or helping them to develop their aspirations.”
Jesus H. McGillicutty Christ. Your ideal is the Fifties? Need I remind you that the children of that decade are the Boomers currently in charge of the planet? Case closed.
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August 25th, 2009 at 10:12 am
I expected this to be one of your Onion links, George.
I’d also say that an awful lot of those boomers suffer from some serious depression, so maybe all that “hope” wasn’t as effective as she’d, um, hoped.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:23 am
John is right. Hope is for dopes and the doomed. There never was anything wrong with a fun whopper of a story. Blyton…Blyton – ahh The River of Adventure. That’s right folks, kids books are supposed to be a great way to hide your troubles and read under the blankets with a flashlight not dwell on the stupid world of adults they will be pulled screaming into. (see link) It was a monster of a series, touched us all – gripped generations and was barely relevant to day to day life. Give the kids treasure. Nice kids books are great and always were. Why wouldn’t authors want to be nice to kids?
August 25th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I wouldn’t want all the books coming out to have a “Blyton’ish view of things”, but I gotta say – I think that there is a glut of really, really depressing YA fiction out there. I think that’s one of the reasons why Jeanne Birdsall’s ‘The Penderwicks’ was such a hit (winning National Book Award for Young People’s Literature) – it was a pleasant story about a relatively happy family, without any suicide, incest, rape, anorexia or insanity. A tad more humour and levity in kid’s lit couldn’t hurt, but of course as a cartoonist, I am a tad biased.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
It’s not the realism that’s a problem, it’s the morphing of bleak realism into fantasy misery as some kind of publishing gold. My evidence is unreleased as yet (the product of some summer reading) but I’m sure you’ll have seen summaries of it: Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall. A high school girl who gets to live the day they die, over and over and over again.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Since when has YF been cheery? Back in my day I remember the librarian reading us Charlotte’s Web. And I seem to recall that story wasn’t the cheeriest of tales either.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Well, it looks like this is another story that’s been blown out of context. Click on my name and scroll down and read some of the comments from the news story, from people who were actually at the event. And on another blog post about the event, Anne Fine commented about the issue herself, and writes:
“Thank you, Adele. And what I actually said was put as a question to the audience of social workers and teachers who deal with vulnerable children. (This was an event organised by Children in Scotland to discuss fiction for children in care and other vulnerable children.) I was simply asking if these bleak endings had any effect on their young clients, and if so, what it was (if they indeed read the books at all). I was not advocating any particular sort of endings. That is a headline invented by the Times Subs to make a news story. And I am a bit surprised that, given the endings of a couple of my own books, notably The Road of Bones and The Tulip Touch, anyone would assume I had advocated anything so horribly simplistic..”
August 26th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Good to know. Thanks, Patricia.