A Family of Readers Read online

  Some years ago, when the Boston Public Library was considering closing a few branches, I wrote to the Boston Globe. To make fresh a point about the value of reading, I mentioned Bill Watterson’s popular comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. Remember, I suggested, how many times Calvin is pictured standing in gloomy half-light by the bedside of his parents, who are either lying there groggy, disbelieving, or are bolting upright, horrified. Whenever Calvin is alarming his drowsy parents, glance at the bedside table. Under the lamp. You’ll always find a book upside-down on spread pages, half-read. Calvin’s parents are always in the middle of a book. Is it any wonder that Calvin has the cranial firepower of a Merlin, a Charles Dickens, a Steven Spielberg? He comes from a reading family.

  The venerable Horn Book Magazine is eighty-six years old. When I first came across it as an undergraduate, the journal was only fifty-two years old (though it spoke with Solomonic confidence born of the convictions of its erudite editor, Paul Heins). As I’ve grown older, it has grown young — partly because its current editor in chief and executive editor, Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano, know that to evaluate contemporary books they are obliged to pay closer attention to contemporary life than earlier editors might have done. The world changes faster than it used to (or is that just me?).

  It’s grown young as I’ve aged because children beginning to read are almost always young. A secret benefit of working on the sidelines of children’s literature is that access to the newest of children’s books is better than Botox at rejuvenation. Watching the dubious reader experience the nitroglycerine jolt of the right book at the right time is one thrill that never grows old.

  The Horn Book Magazine is to children’s books what the Blue Book is to automobile assessments. (Yes, it can be wrong, too: inflated here, distracted there. But only often enough to keep its devoted readers on their toes, kicking the tires of recommended books for themselves.) I bet Calvin’s parents flip through The Horn Book at their local library, or maybe even have their own subscription. As a parent, I read every issue cover to cover the day it arrives. Maybe I’m something of an anomaly — but hey, so is Calvin. And I like that company.

  Once upon a time, the more authoritarian of Horn Book editors — including my dear departed friends Paul and Ethel Heins — would have frowned at my choosing a comic-strip character as a thematic device to introduce a discussion about books and reading. They’d have preferred a fairy-tale favorite: Cinderella, Bluebeard, Rapunzel. Or someone from the classic British fantasies — Alice, Peter Pan, Pooh. They’d have expected (or anyway hoped) that every family would recognize the names of those new-world kids Tom Sawyer, Jo March, Anne of Green Gables, or the Ingalls family of all those little houses in the wilderness.

  And since they never neglected to consider what the latest wave of immigrants might be best able to appreciate, they might have suggested I draw on one of those picture-book masterpieces so often known by one name, the way children think of themselves: Madeline. Babar. Eloise. If I were to strike out, to dare modernity, I’d be expected to turn to established twentieth- century heroes like Harriet the Spy, the Great Gilly Hopkins, or M.C. Higgins, the Great.

  For me to instead employ a pint-size anarchist from the funny pages — what has reading come to? How has the nation’s literary life devolved if, in hoping to speak to everyone in the room, I need to rely on a pop-culture figure?

  Those earlier enthusiasts for children’s books were old-fashioned, yes, but not stodgy. They thought hard and well. After a while, they’d have understood. The worthy missionaries who stocked the libraries we frequented in our childhoods, who talked up new books into classics, these pioneers were not only keen on narrative and cunning on message. They were visually literate, too. Those Horn Book editors of the past would recognize that the book on the bedside table of Calvin’s parents might more likely be Charlotte’s Web or Monster or When You Reach Me than the latest bestseller on the New York Times adult list. That open book, caught in mid-story, might well be something that The Horn Book Magazine recommends with a starred review. After all, those parents were two-thirds of a family of readers. (Or one-half, if you count Hobbes, and maybe you have to.) Those parents were smart. They knew what they were doing.

  Picking up this book, so do you.

  INTRODUCTION ROGER SUTTON

  PART ONE: READING TO THEM

  Overview MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

  CHAPTER ONE: BOOKS FOR BABIES

  A Future of Page Turns MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

  From the HORN BOOK family

  What Makes a Good Mother Goose? JOANNA RUDGE LONG

  Trashing Elmo GINEE SEO AND BRUCE BROOKS

  MORE GREAT BOOKS FOR BABIES

  CHAPTER TWO: PICTURE BOOKS

  Stores of Transferable Energy MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

  From the HORN BOOK family

  “Again” KEVIN HENKES

  The Words CHARLOTTE ZOLOTOW

  The Pictures MARGOT ZEMACH

  How to Read the Pictures: John Steptoe’s Baby Says KATHLEEN T. HORNING

  Design Matters

  JON SCIESZKA; ILLUSTRATED BY LANE SMITH; DESIGNED BY MOLLY LEACH

  An Interview with MAURICE SENDAK

  Scary Picture Books DEBORAH STEVENSON

  What Makes a Good Alphabet Book? LOLLY ROBINSON

  Accumulated Power MARGARET MAHY

  “Have a Carrot” CYNTHIA VOIGT

  What Makes a Good “Three Little Pigs”? JOANNA RUDGE LONG

  What Makes a Good Preschool Science Book? BETTY CARTER

  Delicious Rhythms, Enduring Words NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

  MORE GREAT PICTURE BOOKS

  MORE GREAT FOLKLORE

  PART TWO: READING WITH THEM

  Overview ROGER SUTTON

  CHAPTER THREE: EASY READERS

  I Can Read a Whole Book ROGER SUTTON

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Unlucky Arithmetic DEAN SCHNEIDER AND ROBIN SMITH

  Look LOIS LOWRY

  MORE GREAT EASY READERS

  CHAPTER FOUR: CHAPTER BOOKS

  Situations Become Stories ROGER SUTTON

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Books Were Everywhere VIRGINIA HAMILTON

  MORE GREAT CHAPTER BOOKS

  PART THREE: READING ON THEIR OWN

  Overview ROGER SUTTON

  CHAPTER FIVE: GENRES

  Introduction ROGER SUTTON

  FANTASY

  “Your Journey Is Inward, but It Will Seem Outward” DEIRDRE F. BAKER

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Waking Dreams JANE LANGTON

  MORE GREAT FANTASY

  HISTORICAL FICTION

  When Dinosaurs Watched Black-and-White TV BETTY CARTER

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Writing Backward ANNE SCOTT MACLEOD

  MORE GREAT HISTORICAL FICTION

  HUMOR

  Banana Peels at Every Step SARAH ELLIS

  From the HORN BOOK family

  “What’s So Funny, Mr. Scieszka?” JON SCIESZKA

  MORE GREAT HUMOR

  ADVENTURE

  Know-How and Guts VICKY SMITH

  From the HORN BOOK family

  The Incredible Journey BETSY BYARS

  MORE GREAT ADVENTURE BOOKS

  CHAPTER SIX: NONFICTION

  Introduction ROGER SUTTON

  NONFICTION

  Cinderella Without the Fairy Godmother MARC ARONSON

  From the HORN BOOK family

  The Missing Parts DEBORAH HOPKINSON

  MORE GREAT NONFICTION

  BIOGRAPHY

  A Story, by Someone Else, More than a Hundred Pages BETTY CARTER

  From the HORN BOOK family

  An Interview with RUSSELL FREEDMAN

  MORE GREAT
BIOGRAPHIES

  SCIENCE

  More than Just the Facts DANIELLE J. FORD

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Three Tests DIANA LUTZ

  What Makes a Good Dinosaur Book? DANIELLE J. FORD

  MORE GREAT SCIENCE BOOKS

  POETRY

  Up the Bookcase to Poetry ALICE SCHERTLE

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Gazing at Things NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

  MORE GREAT POETRY

  CHAPTER SEVEN: GIRL BOOKS AND BOY BOOKS

  Introduction ROGER SUTTON

  GIRL BOOKS

  Telling the Truth CHRISTINE HEPPERMANN

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Becoming Judy Blume COE BOOTH

  Everygirl KITTY FLYNN

  Grow Up with Us, You’ll Be Fine MITALI PERKINS

  MORE GREAT GIRL BOOKS

  BOY BOOKS

  Go Big or Go Home ROGER SUTTON

  From the HORN BOOK family

  The Masculinity Chart ROBERT LIPSYTE

  Stats MARC ARONSON

  An Interview with JON SCIESZKA

  MORE GREAT BOY BOOKS

  CHAPTER EIGHT: MESSAGES

  Introduction ROGER SUTTON

  From the HORN BOOK family

  What Makes a Good Sex Ed Book? CHRISTINE HEPPERMANN

  Reading about Families in My Family MEGAN LAMBERT

  What Ails Bibliotherapy? MAEVE VISSER KNOTH

  An Interview with KATHERINE PATERSON

  PART FOUR: LEAVING THEM ALONE

  Overview ROGER SUTTON

  CHAPTER NINE: BOOKS FOR TEENS

  The Discovery of Like-Minded Souls ROGER SUTTON

  From the HORN BOOK family

  Where Snoop and Shakespeare Meet JANET MCDONALD

  What Makes a Good Thriller? NANCY WERLIN

  An Interview with SARAH DESSEN

  Holden at Sixteen BRUCE BROOKS

  The Guys’ Clubhouse VIRGINIA EUWER WOLFF

  MORE GREAT BOOKS FOR TEENS

  CONCLUSION ROGER SUTTON

  RESOURCES

  Bibliography of Recommended Titles

  Further Reading

  Notes on Contributors

  Credits and Permissions

  Once upon a time, a title like A Family of Readers would have called up cozy images of reading by the fireplace — Ma reading aloud, Pa whittling, the children listening respectfully. But today, debates about what qualifies as “reading” are as noisy as the concurrent fights over what can be called a “family.” In this book we have no uncertainty: a family is a group of at least two people who care about one another; by reading, we mean books. Right about now you may be sensing that this is a book that features informed opinions from passionate readers, not bland lists of dos, don’ts, and “surefire recommendations.” You are right. This is not a book for parents who badly want their children to read but are “too busy” to read for their own pleasure. It’s for parents who wish their children would be a wee bit more understanding when Mom or Dad is lost in a book. If the thought of looking up from your dinner — and your book — and seeing heads bowed in pursuance of same is your idea of a good time, you’re in the right place.

  But your passion for reading isn’t necessarily accompanied by a knowledge of children’s books, and that’s where we come in. In A Family of Readers, we seek to provide parents and other interested adults with an essential understanding of books for children and teenagers. Grown-up readers can be a bit like the twins John and Barbara in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins. As babies, the twins happily converse with the sunlight and the wind and the starling who visits through the nursery window until the dark day arrives when they respond to the bird’s greeting with gurgles and “Be-lah-belah-belah-belah!” Not only had they forgotten the “language of the sunlight and the stars,” but they had forgotten they ever knew it. Adults can be like this with children’s books, looking for utility or edification, and completely forgetting what drew them into reading in the first place. Given the chance, kids will read the same way adults do: for themselves. Don’t think of books for young people as tools; try instead to treat them as invitations into the reading life.

  That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you’ll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guide, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such “strategies” as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody’s favorite thing: homework. For more than eighty years, The Horn Book has been saying that reading is its own reward, for children and adults alike.

  A Reading Child

  I learned how to read in the first grade. There was no public kindergarten in my town; nor were there early-learning methods of parenting (kindergarten was seen as “progressive,” and parenting was not yet a verb). I don’t remember if my teacher, Miss Weber, drilled us in phonics or whole-word recognition, but I remember with clarity the exercise that earned me my first book. Miss Weber would divide us into pairs and send us in staggered shifts to corners of the classroom to sit on the floor and read aloud from See Sally Run–type primers. (Such books come in for much abuse these days, but I have to say that I loved Macmillan’s primer Ted and Sally.) When we had completed ten stories in this fashion, Miss Weber would reward us with a new hardcover book. Mine was Betty Baker and Arnold Lobel’s Little Runner of the Longhouse, a product of Harper’s I Can Read glory days. It was a prize: while children don’t consciously read to improve themselves, they do appreciate accomplishment.

  Little Runner of the Longhouse joined the books that had been part of my preschool landscape at home. Robert Lawson’s They Were Strong and Good and Elizabeth Guilfoile’s Nobody Listens to Andrew were the first books I loved. I have no recollection of how either book came into the house; they seemed to have always been there. For children, books are just as much physical objects — like the furniture or the cat — as they are “vessels of meaning.” (This is not an identification limited to childhood; think of your dog-eared copy of Dune.) The favorite ones, particularly, have a specific physicality apart from their content. I remember the Lawson book mostly physically, as I often scrutinized individual pictures from it at some length. I loved the dark, dramatic lines but completely missed the humor. Andrew evokes a different experience, that of knowing a story by heart and of an intense identification with the hero, whose news cannot wait and is truly important: there’s a bear in his bed.

  The important thing is that those books were there for me to find. I’m reminded of the artist Judy Chicago’s remark to the assistants with whom she was creating “Womanhouse.” The assistants said they would buy a hammer when the need suggested it, but Chicago countered that already having a hammer suggests the need to do something with it. Books work the same way. It’s great when a kid fired with enthusiasm for a hobby or a celebrity or an extinct species can read a book that abets and stokes his or her interest. But it’s better still to have the potential afforded by reading already in place, both in the reader’s fluency and in the shape of lots of things to read. A reader’s life will contain annotations to its nature and events in the books that have accompanied it.

  By the fourth grade, I was completely into it. I became something of a party trick for my parents after I read The Scarlet Letter in emulation of my sister, Anne, who was reading it in high school. One of my earliest book reviews — “I liked best the part where Hester and the minister rolled around in the woods” — always got a big laugh. At school, we had one of those paperback book clubs, where a seductive leaflet would list all the possible purchases for that month. Pondering the choices was an engrossing activity of about a week’s duration for me, and I endured the lessons of delayed gratification while waiting for the books to arrive. The teacher handed them o
ut with some ceremony, calling each pupil to her desk and announcing the choices. Did I know what would happen when she proclaimed that I had purchased a book called Mary Jane? The book, a story about two black teenagers integrating an all-white school, remained a favorite for many years, but I have never forgiven that teacher for joining in the laughter that greeted her indiscretion.

  I have now been working with children and books for thirty years, and I rely perhaps too much on my own history as a lifelong, die-hard bookworm. I can understand the concept of the “reluctant reader,” but for me it’s akin to saying somebody really doesn’t like to eat. Or breathe. I was what the late Horn Book editor Ethel Heins called a “reading child.” The questions I ask as the current editor of The Horn Book are the ones I think necessary for the welfare of today’s “reading children”: How do we give children the skills and opportunity to read? How do we create books that both interest and respect them? How do we allow children mastery and ownership of their reading? How do we know when to guide, and when to leave a reader alone?

  Blowing the Horn

  The Horn Book Magazine has a long history of grappling with these questions. Founded in 1924, it grew out of the “suggested purchase” lists compiled by Bertha Mahony Miller as proprietor of Boston’s Bookshop for Boys and Girls, established in 1918. The Bookshop was closed in 1936, but the magazine thrived in concert with the rise of children’s book publishing and the establishment of children’s departments in the nation’s public libraries. Throughout The Horn Book’s history it has responded both to the events of the moment — new immigrants, the space race (Isaac Asimov was a columnist for many years), the civil rights movement — and to its constant mission, announced in the first issue, to “blow the horn for fine books for boys and girls.” The Horn Book’s critical standards have always been high (by our lights, anyway; others have called us stuffy and worse!), and our foremost concerns are for literary and pictorial achievement in books for children; the potential popularity or “usefulness” of a given title is secondary.

  In this book, executive editor Martha Parravano and I, aided by the work of our editorial colleagues, reviewers, and contributors, hope to bring The Horn Book’s point of view to an audience we generally reach only through the librarians and teachers who already know us. It is a book for readers, people who need books as much as food or air, and whose idea of the perfect vacation and/or evening meal is to have more time to read. We shall begin with books for the youngest children and proceed on up through pre-readers to new readers, to the evolving independent reader, to the one who reads with friends, to the one who needs to be left alone. In each section we offer an introductory essay, giving our sense of the challenges and opportunities in the literature for a particular age group. We then ask our experts, mainly Horn Book reviewers who specialize in particular genres, to weigh in: What are the great children’s fantasies? Why are joke books important? Then we invite others, including artists, authors, and designers, to add their views and experiences. In her essay, the New Zealand author Margaret Mahy talks about the “inner echoing library” of children’s books that we carry inside us: the contributors to this book have the good fortune of having especially well-stocked shelves to share. Some contributors relate personal moments with a book and child that we hope resonate with you. Others sort out the characteristics that make for a particularly good version of a canonical book or story — such as Mother Goose collections, or “The Three Little Pigs,” or the thriller genre. Each chapter ends with a selection of recent books of the pertinent genre; in the very back of this book, you will see lists of all the books recommended here, organized loosely by age group.