(Auction for refugee relief ended.)

Auction has ended. Thanks to everyone who bid! Altogether the Writing for Charity auction raised over $29,000, all of which will go to Lifting Hands International for refugee relief.

Hey, incipient children's writers, here's an opportunity to help refugees and have me critique your manuscript!

As part of the Writing for Charity auction to benefit refugee relief, organized by authors Shannon Hale and Mette Ivie Harrison, I'm offering a critique of a middle grade manuscript up to 75,000 words.

See the offer here.

Proceeds from the auction will go to Lifting Hands International.

There are tons of other items --lots of other critiques offered! Plus more cool stuff, including a pole dance by two award winning authors; I'm not making this up.

To bid in the auction, you'll need to set up an account.

Bidding closes at 1 a.m. on 5/3/16. I'm not clear on the time zone, but I'm going to wildly guess they mean Mountain Time, which would be midnight Pacific and 3 a.m. Eastern. To be on the safe side, bid early!
(And often.)

Walter Dean Myers and the World We've Lost

Walter Dean Myers died today. With this sudden loss, his much-read New York Times opinion piece from this past March takes on the character of a final charge to the kidlit community. One I hope we will fulfill.

What I thought when I first read the piece (from a perspective, of course, that began some 30 years after that of Mr. Myers) was this:

It wasn't always like this.

Here's a book from my shelves. If memory serves (it occasionally does) my brother bought it for the cover price of 1.50 at The Book Worm, a shop around 15 miles from our home. We bought books there sometimes, when we were in funds-- books by Walter Dean Myers, and S.E. Hinton, and John D. Fitzgerald, and Mildred Taylor. The books were all, like this one, modest in size and presentation. The Potterquake was still far in the future, and the children's book market wasn't anywhere near as competitive as it is now.

Hold onto that last thought. It's important.

In this long ago world, computers were vast objects that filled an entire room, and nothing went "beep" except automobile horns. Local volunteer firemen used to take all us village kids on long, long night rides atop the fire trucks and we were allowed to put out the streetlamps with the searchlights. Kids roamed freely in the fields and forests; no one expected anyone so patently annoying as us to be kidnapped.

The kids in Walter Dean Myers's books explored just like us, only in Harlem. That interested us. We climbed about in barns; Myers's characters roamed abandoned buildings. We rode our bikes down the steepest hills we could find; Myers's characters did wheelies. Harlem was a different world-- but these characters were fully relatable.

It had clearly never occurred to anybody at The Book Worm that the kids in a nearly all-white community wouldn't want to read books about kids in Harlem. As you can tell from the cover, it also hadn't occurred to anyone at Avon Books that since the majority of American children were white, black children ought to be kept off book covers. There can certainly have been no idea that the books were somehow Special Interest, rather than mainstream. The Book Worm was about the size of the average motel room, with no shelf space for Special Interest.

In his New York Times piece this past March, Myers wrote:

"...This was exactly what I wanted to do when I wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country."

I can only speak to the first part of Myers's wish. Mission accomplished. We ate these books with a spoon. Any suggestion that we shouldn't, or wouldn't, or couldn't have done so would have had to come to us from adults. No adults obliged.

We grew up. The Myers books got tucked onto a shelf with many others. The Potterquake came along and shook the children's book world to its core. And the annual output of children's books tripled.

The number of children, however, did not.

Suddenly the children's book world got more competitive. It became necessary to find an edge wherever one could. Covers became a matter of intense study and scrutiny-- what would attract readers? What would repel them?

At some point, someone somewhere seems to have decided, based on who knows what data or theory or madness, that a protagonist of color on the cover would not attract readers. (Begging the question: Which readers?)

There followed a period of several years during which African-American characters-- and, to a lesser extent, other characters of color-- vanished from the covers of children's books. Books that had a protagonist of color would show something non-human on the cover-- a symbol, a building, a monster, anything! Or the protagonist would appear in silhouette. Or, in what quickly came to be known as whitewashing, the protagonist would be shown on the cover but would have mysteriously lost melanin.

I see signs that this is dying out. I still think we have a long way to go before we progress to the point we were at in 1977. But I think that we've passed our nadir, and we're on an upward climb. Characters of color are reappearing on book covers, and some of them are even African-American.

We can do better, though. We can do so much better.

Let's do it for Walter Dean Myers.

Kids' Author Carnival NYC

Be sure to join us if you can for the Kids' Author Carnival at Jefferson Market Library in New York City on May 31st, 2014!

Free admission to all ages, doors open at 5:30, events 6:00-8:30 pm.

38 genuine middle grade authors will be in attendance! Activities, fun, book signings. See you there!

Authors participating:

Kwame Alexander
Shelby Bach
Kelly Barnhill
Jeff Baron
Rebecca Behrens
Josh Berk
Sage Blackwood
Isaiah Campbell
Caroline Carlson
Soman Chainani
Matthew Cody
Edith Cohn
Bruce Coville
Jen Swann Downey
Paul Durham
Tim Federle
Laura Marx Fitzgerald
Tommy Greenwald
Christopher Healy
Kody Keplinger
Claire Legrand
Dana Alison Levy
Elizabeth Levy
Alexander London
Lauren Magaziner
Jen Malone
Kate Milford
Michael Northrop
Dan Poblocki
Marie Rutkoski
Heidi Schulz
Michelle Schusterman
Polly Shulman
Laurel Snyder
Aaron Starmer
Lauren Tarshis
Mary G. Thompson
Danette Vigilante

What Is Middle Grade?

Every middle grade author seems to get this question:

"Should my kid read your book?"

Of course the correct response to this is "Yes, yes, absolutely! Buy it at once. In fact, just to be on the safe side, buy a copy for every room in the house."

But really, we just don't know. We're not sure what you're asking.

Recently someone phrased the question in a way that made the issue clearer to me. "Would my kid like your books? You said you write middle grade. She's in 3rd grade. Is that middle grade? She reads at a 9th grade level, though."

Now I understand the question.

The "middle grade" label hasn't been around that long, and it's not clear to most people what it means. It's not clear to me, come to that. The books tend to have grade levels or age levels stamped on the jacket flap, leaving both children and adults with the impression that "middle grade" is a measure of reading difficulty.

I think that it is not.

Most middle grade novels are not easier to read than most adult novels. In fact, they may be harder. However, they are not too hard for most upper elementary children. Neither are most adult novels too hard for them, come to that. The Hobbit has a higher lexile level (whatever that is) than Cry, the Beloved Country.

Vaguely, the age levels on the book jacket might suggest interest level. But the suggestion is not exclusive. I hear from a lot of adults who read my books.

So I thought maybe what the parent was really asking was just what "middle grade" means. And here's the definition of middle grade fiction I came up with.

In a middle grade novel:

• There may be some swearing, but it's usually limited and/or not spelled out on the page.
• Romance may happen, but it's not the focus. There will be no sex scenes.
• Bad things may happen, but despair is never permanent. Ultimately it turns out that life is worth living.

That's not a full and exact definition, of course. Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny is middle grade under that definition. (A book I loved at age ten, by the way.) But it's the best I can come up with right now.

Every time I try to add something to it, I either think of exceptions or realize that I'm trying to impose my own preferences.

After writing this definition, I started googling to see what other people think "middle grade" means. And I'm afraid I disagree with a lot of them. Here's what I think middle grade is not:

• It's not a reading level.
• It's not written with simplified sentence structure, easier vocabulary, or lower expectations for plot and character development.
• The plot is not external-rather-than-internal. It can be either; it can be both.
• It does not necessarily feature a protagonist who is between 8 and 13 years of age.

Anyway. My definition may be so much blather. But it's what I've got for the moment.

Were the Oz Books Girls' Books?

Before there was Harry Potter, there was Oz. There was a lot of Oz. There were 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum published between 1900 and 1920, and there were dozens more written by other authors after his death.

Baum received thousands of fan letters. People lined up to buy the books. There was merchandising. There was probably fanfic too, but, you know, not online. 

Oz was big.

Oz wasn't the "just a dream" world of the movie. It was a real magical world that was visited by real children-- a girl named Betsy, and a girl named Trot, and a girl named Dorothy, and... maybe some other girls. I don't remember.

My grandfather read all the Baum Oz books as a child, while women battled for the right to vote and men battled for German trenches. There was nothing remotely similar being published at the time. Children's fiction was dominated by the Depressingly Moral (let's just say Little Eva has a lot to answer for) and the shoot 'em up action adventure. No one could die in Oz. This was a flaw as far as narrative tension, but a real innovation otherwise.

Given a choice between reading about brave little heroines wasting away from consumption and reading about the caverns of the Nome King, kids chose the latter. Early twen-cen kids loved the Oz books.

Many decades later, my brother and I read them. First we read all the L. Frank Baum ones, and then all the Ruth Plumley Thompson ones and the John R. Neill ones. Even as late as the 1970s, they were a large part of the extant body of children's fantasy literature.

Although the main character, Dorothy, was a girl, and the other main child characters (Betsy and Trot and Princess Ozma) were girls, and the only boy we saw much of in the Baum books (Button Bright) was kind of a low-watt bulb, nobody ever suggested to us that these were girls' books.

One of the Baum books does have a boy protagonist, Tip,  who ***spoiler alert*** near the end of the book becomes a girl. Permanently. If this traumatized my grandfather or my brother for life, they never mentioned it.

 

(Chances a middle grade author could get away with that nowadays: Zero.)

(Possibly slightly less than that.)

I've talked to my brother about this a bit over the years, as he's raised children and I've raised books. According to him, he never, as a child, experienced any failure to connect to a female protagonist because of her un-maleness. According to him, the only books he felt were off-limits to him were those that were clearly identified as being "for girls"...

...and that is what we're doing far too much of today.

I'm picturing how the Oz books might be published today... in a world where they weren't already classics, that is. Pink and lavender covers. Glitter, perhaps. Lots of emphasis on the Princess aspect.

After all, no one would expect boys to read a book about girls.