A heartfelt thank-you to everyone who sent kind wedding wishes to Gareth and me, either here on the blog or on our Facebook pages or direct to us via e-mail. We tied the knot on Saturday, September 12th at a children’s summer camp, Camp Wing in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and we are now MARRIED! I am keeping my name so you needn’t start referring to me as “Mrs. Hinds” (though I won’t be offended if you do).
Those of you curious about the details of our wedding will, I know, want to see photos, but for now we’ve got very few of those, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for more satisfaction on that count. After our OVERWHELMINGLY talented photographers, Heather Gilson and Jon Almeda of One Love Photo, have sent us more pics I will most likely put together a post that includes a few more photos and wedding details, should you want to see such a thing!
In the meantime, this one shot will give you a sneak peek at our perfect (and perfectly rainy!) day. (Click to view it much larger on Heather’s blog.) If your jaw dropped at the loveliness and artistry of the shot then you’ll understand why Gareth and I were beyond thrilled when, after Heather Gilson and I struck up an e-mail friendship last year, she offered to photograph our wedding at a price that wouldn’t completely blow our (rather small) budget. She is a photography miracle worker and, as it turns out, no stranger to the book world. She contributed the photos to Chronicle Books’ Up to No Good: The Rascally Things Boys Do As Told By Perfectly Decent Grown Men, edited by Kitty Harmon and currently has another book in the works — this one wedding-related. AND her mom’s a former first grade teacher, so she knows all too well the joy and value of children’s literature. AND she’s just a peach. And a half! As is her other half, Jon Almeda, who now photographs weddings with her. Gareth and I had a blast hanging out with these two on our wedding day. They fit right in with our 115 guests (all beloved friends and family), and they were perfectly adept at keeping the wheels of our wedding day running smoothly, all of which is ALSO true of illustrator Anna Alter and her husband Bruno Trindade, who helped to coordinate Gareth’s and my wedding day, and whose wedding day WE helped to coordinate a few months earlier! Stay tuned for a post about THEIR special day. In the meantime you can read what Anna had to say about ours!

Today I had an attitude,
That’s what my parents say.
They said it was a bad-itude
And took my toys away.
So now I’m stuck here by myself
With nobody who cares —
I wish when they had attitudes
They’d send themselves upstairs!

I wrote this poem a few years back and sent it to a family magazine, which decided the premise did not strike an appropriate tone and sent it back with a note to that effect. Sincere regrets, etc. I didn’t mind that it wasn’t published—it is just a smartypants little poem—but I found the logic faulty: kids relish a little bad behavior and subversive self-expression in books; they’re a safe outlet at the least, and can be life-changers at the most.

I was an absurdly well-behaved child—due to parental insistence more than my own nature, I’m afraid—which is why, I suppose, I gravitated toward naughty kids in literature. I loved Eloise and the insouciance with which she strewed mild destruction in her wake. I loved the poetry of Shel Silverstein with its litany of dreadfully disobedient children, and John Ciardi’s cheerily doomed boys and girls in You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You (a treasure still in print, illustrated by Edward Gorey; don’t miss the read-aloud goodness of its Halloween poem, by the way). I couldn’t get enough of William E. Cole’s delightful (but now OP) Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls, a veritable menagerie of obnoxious children wreaking mischief and havoc. They refused to brush their teeth. They taunted sharks. They interrupted adults. They put MUSTARD in each other’s SHOES! And those were the good kids.

If I felt guiltily gleeful reading about over-the-top naughty characters who got away with things my parents decidedly would not have tolerated, I was alarmed and fascinated by the overtly obstinate. I never exactly identified with "terrible, horrible" Edie, Isabelle (the "itch"), Maureen in The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House, or bully Veronica Ganz, but they fascinated me, and I understood that they were, by and large, misunderstood (and what child can’t relate to that?).

The Secret Garden‘s Mary was shockingly pinchy and sallow. Although I wasn’t generally a sullen child, I certainly had my moments, and I appreciated Mary for being as ugly as I felt in my most unpleasant incarnations, or at least a close contender. I could feel the tonic powers of Dickon’s rosy cheeks and cheerful whistle—and, of course, the garden itself—on Mary’s prickliness, and it worked on me, too. Robert Burch’s Queenie Peavy is also angry for good reason; she misses her dad, who is in jail, and the shame and public teasing from other kids is a lot to bear. Her experiment with being "good" for a day has unexpected results.

I wasn’t lucky enough to be a child when Katherine Paterson’s brilliant The Great Gilly Hopkins came out, but reading it as an adult made me feel like an eleven-year-old again. Gilly is a much tougher cookie than I ever was, and I loved her for it. She said "no" when she meant "no." She acted mean when she felt mean. She stole money—from a blind man! She was horrible, and very, very human. I was astonished that Paterson "allowed" Gilly to be so bad, to be—worst of all—callously, ignorantly racist. These were brave decisions for an author to make, because they are so alienating to readers. And yet Gilly is lovable; her defiance comes from pain, she is smart and funny and a secret optimist, so when Paterson takes Gilly step by step through her slow transformation and unfolding, we believe it, and we forgive her. She learns how to be strong without destroying others and walling off her own heart.

There was a less well-known character who was as prickly as Mary, as difficult as Gilly, and as angry as Queenie: her name was Kizzy. She was the tough, lonely main character of Rumer Godden’s The Diddakoi—retitled Gypsy Girl in a re-release that is now also, sadly, OP—a "gypsy" girl on her own in the world and bullied to the point of collapse. It was an upsetting book to read as a kid, to experience children’s cruelty at its worst, but Kizzy’s resilience was inspiring and hard-earned, and her story (much like Eleanor Estes’ The Hundred Dresses) paints a picture of both true compassion and its ugly opposite. These were indelible images, indeed, for middle-graders trying to navigate the waters of who they want to be.

Finally, there were the funny flawed girls. There was something wonderfully reassuring about kids like Harriet (the spy), Barbara Brooks Wallace’s Claudia, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona, and Constance C. Greene’s Al, four comfortably rumpled girls whose imperfections were sometimes funny, sometimes not. Their ill-advised choices or unlovely thoughts weren’t sugar-coated, but they came to realizations about themselves and others, and apologized, and were forgiven, and redeemed themselves, and moved on. I think that’s what was so appealing, in a nutshell: these girls proved that there was life after mistakes, that love wasn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. These were real kids, stumbling clumsily along, with as much laughter as crisis, and tender, vulnerable hearts beating underneath the bad behavior. When you’re a kid, and your brain is still transitioning from concrete, literal thinking to being able to see and tolerate shades of grey, redemption (untidy as it may be) is both nourishing and necessary. It’s a tasty dish for adults, too.

Who were your favorite "bad" boys and girls, and why?

***

(Thanks to Liza Woodruff for the perfect sketch.)

Books mentioned in this post (* = in print):

*Eloise (and series) by Kay Thompson, illus
.
by Hilary Knight (Simon & Schuster)

*Books by Shel Silverstein (HarperCollins)

*You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You by John Ciardi, illus. by Edward Gorey (HarperCollins)

Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls by William E. Cole, illus. by Tomi Ungerer (OP)

Terrible, Horrible Edie by Elizabeth C. Spykman (coming back in print from New York Review of Books 5/18/10)

Isabelle the Itch by Constance C. Greene (OSI)

*The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House by Mary Chase, illus. by Peter Sis (Yearling)

*Veronica Ganz (also Peter & Veronica) by Marilyn S. Sachs (Backinprint.com)

*The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, illus. by Tasha Tudor (HarperTrophy)

The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden (later titled, Gypsy Girl) (OSI)

*The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, illus. by Louis Slobodkin (Harcourt)

*The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson (HarperCollins)

*Queenie Peavy by Robert Burch, illus. by Jerry Lazare (Puffin)

*Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (Yearling)

*Claudia (and *Claudia and Duffy and *Hello, Claudia,by Barbara Brooks Wallace (Backinprint.com)

*Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary (now with a very cute cover) (HarperTrophy)

*A Girl Called Al (the rest of the series is OP) by Constance C. Greene, illus. by Byron Barton

There are lots of great books out there. Every day booksellers have the opportunity to literally place books in the hands of customers. The art of handselling is just that: an art. It involves quickly assessing what the customer wants, even when they’re not sure, and more quickly finding a  book for them to consider.  Often I will just hand the customer one book to look at. I find sometimes that pure confidence in your choice makes it easy for the customer to trust the selection.

My favorite books to handsell change with each season, but there are some that I just love season to season.  I’ve tried to pick one from each section.

A board book that I just love selling is Good Night, Gorilla. Charming art and a very clever story, full of humor, make this one an easy choice for people looking for a baby book that isn’t Goodnight Moon.
Perhaps one of my favorite books of all time, Sector 7 is a wonderful adventure. There is something so magical about this wordless book. Every time I show it someone I discover something new. Because it’s wordless, it works for a myriad of ages from toddlers through adults. Every once in a while, I have to really walk someone through the book, because they don’t trust a book without words, but once I get going, usually they’re right there with me.

Moving to chapter books, I have two that I love to recommend. I think of these as less common than the usual chapter books out there. I absolutely adore Johanna Hurwitz’s series that begins with Pee-Wee’s Tale. Take a guinea pig who teaches himself how to read by reading the newspaper on the bottom of cage, throw in a Central Park adventure and you’ve got a great book for emerging readers.  The other series I love to give to new readers is animal-based as well, More Favourite Animal Tales by Jill Tomlinson. This is a collection of three of the books; they are also available as single stories (there are six stories in all). These feature animals having real human emotions. I like that both of these are series books, so kids can really sink in and enjoy.

The middle grade section brings two very different handselling options. The first, Shug, is a fun book to recommend to girls (and boys) who want a little romance but aren’t ready for more than a first kiss. The book rings so true that kids actually handsell it better than I do. For kids who want more of a fantasy, The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles is one of the all-time favorite handsells at the Flying Pig. I came to the book as a adult because my partner Elizabeth read it 25 times when it first came out in the 1970s, and it’s just so good.

There are so many young adults books that are great, but there is one that I consistently go back to when kids are looking for realistic fiction that is well written and deals with tough topics realistically, and that’s Sarah Dessen. Dreamland is my favorite book of hers because it takes the topic of abuse and really sheds a light on it. I always suggest that parents and kids read this one together. Another book that’s great fun to hand to readers looking for something different is Feed. Nothing sells a book better than the first sentence of this book: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."
These are just a few of my favorite go-to books — books that don’t often disappoint customers, that I feel really good recommending and selling.

I’d love to hear from other booksellers about some of their favorite books to handsell.

Pasted below is a perfect gem of a poem by Raymond Carver, to which I think many ShelfTalker readers will be able to relate. This one originally appeared in All of Us: The Collected Poems.

Rain

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Remember those friendly middle-grade novels where kids have everyday problems and their parents, while flawed, are not only functional but are also loving, funny, exasperated, and kind? Well, there’s a new one in town, folks, and it’s charming.

The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z by Kate Messner follows a disorganized middle-grader, Gianna, through the trials and tribulations of her attempts to complete a major seventh-grade requirement in her state: the dreaded Leaf Project. The kids are required to collect, identify, and present (in any way they choose) 25 different species of leaves. It doesn’t sound that hard, and the kids have at least a month to do the project, but Gianna has a little problem with procrastination and distraction. (Oh, I love her; she is so familiar, with her lost permission slips and crumpled homework, her forgotten gym shoes and 11th-hour project efforts. Honestly, she brings me back to my entire childhood.)

Fortunately, Gianna is surrounded by organized friends and family; her male best friend, Zig, is her portable memory at school and helps her stay on track while studying at home. Gianna’s mother, a veritable model of organization, has a hard time understanding Gianna’s well-meaning but haphazard ways. As if the usual school requirements weren’t distracting enough, Gianna’s grandmother has started to have increasingly alarming little memory moments; she leaves her teeth in the refrigerator (no biggie) and forgets she’s put cookies in the oven (biggie). SPOILER ALERT: Usually, a close relationship with a grandparent in a novel is a sure harbinger of grief ahead. The more loving the grandparent, the more likely he/she is to die by book’s end. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that the author here takes a less-trodden path.

Gianna has a great outlet for her energy and anxieties: she’s a runner on the track team, a star sprinter. But unless she can bring up her grades and complete the leaf project on time, she won’t be able to compete in a very big meet. The obstacles between Gianna and her completed leaf project are many; some are comical (a scene where she essentially steals a leaf from the principal’s yard is very funny), and some are more serious (a running rival has it in for Gianna and her project; Gianna has a legitimate excuse for one lost deadline when her grandmother goes missing). There’s a budding romance that starts when her feelings for Zig start to confuse her.

What I love about this book is how solid and fun and comfortable it feels to be in Gianna’s world. Even though she struggles mightily with her own failings, trying to find the strengths within them, her life is essentially a solid, relatively safe one, and there’s something so appealing about that. There are quirky details, too, treated matter-of-factly; Gianna’s family runs a funeral parlor, and occasionally her dad picks her up from school in the hearse (at least the back is always empty; it would show disrespect to make the deceased run errands).

Messner (shown at left) is wryly observant but always warm in her portrayal of her characters. She herself is a seventh-grade teacher in addition to being a writer, which gives her school scenes and kid dynamics that added ring of authenticity. The characters are well-rounded and memorable, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, and Gianna is a great kid you’ve surely met somewhere in your life. It was frankly a surprise to me how well the author wrote about a disorganized character, since she is one of the best-organized people I’ve ever met.

Earlier this month we hosted Gianna Z‘s launch party, since the author lives not too far away across Lake Champlain, in a town which (sadly) has lost its independent bookstores. The party was a pleasure. Kate Messner and her family brought delicious "Grandma’s funeral cookies" (a version of Mexican wedding cookies), and candy corn, and we had drinks and more cookies. She had a raffle for teachers and librarians; the prize winner received a future free author visit from Kate.

She also brought leafy branches she laid out on two tables in the front of the room for kids and adults to identify after her reading (which was excellent, by the way—clear and engaging and just long enough) and she came prepared with prizes for everyone who identified any two leaves out of the three or four types. The tables were humming with activity. Turns out it’s not THAT easy to identify leaves. We used tree identification booklets; Kate brought several of these, an amazing little resource called Tree Finder: A Manual for the Identification of Trees by Their Leaves by May T. Watts, one of a group of pocket field guides worth investigating. (At left, a group of leaf investigators.)

Kate also brought her son’s incredibly well-organized seventh-grade Leaf Project notebook from a few years ago, which was fun to leaf through (arr arr), and her younger daughter proved to be a valuable ally in the leaf identity challenge. A mere seven or so years old, she was an expert on the subject and helpfully guided our group through some tricky identification questions involving numbers of lobes.

This event was terrific not only because it had a good turnout (thanks in part to Kate, who supplements bookstore promotion with her own mailings and social networking skills), but also because the atmosphere the author created was one of collaboration and warmth. Not only did she thank the bookstore for hosting the event, she praised independent bookstores as a vital and necessary and valuable part of the fabric of a community. She also took the time to introduce to the audience several authors who were attending her reading, a gracious gesture that spoke volumes about her generosity—a trait she shares with her characters.

This week has been a tremendous week for books about art for young children.  Amid the boxes that have flooded my store (have I mentioned the tractor trailer truck from Hachette last week that unloaded so many boxes, my staffer kept saying, "This must be a duplicate order"?) I have noticed some downright lovely books featuring art.

For the youngest child, there is a stunning ABC book, My First ABC from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This ABC book is sturdy, and like the best board books, the text is spare and the art is big.  This is not a board book based in snobbery or elitism. It is based on the simple format ABC: a letter and a picture with extraordinary examples. For A there is the Apples painting by Paul Cezanne. K is Mother’s Kiss by Mary Cassatt. P is a peacock from a 1610 painting, Krishna Dancing from the Garden of Delights. Art lovers, illustrators and parents yearning for a little something different will find this book a treasure. Babies will like the pictures, which show different examples of things they might already know. And the pages are just as good to chew as other board books.

For children just a little older there is the artist study book, Monet’s Impressions: Words and Pictures by Claude Monet. This slender, yummy book is something to spend time with. Designed for younger readers with thick picture book pages, each page features a sentence and an art piece. It’s not as simple as the alphabet book, some of the phrases are meant to be puzzled over. For example the phrase "Light spilling everywhere" is accompanied by the painting Landscape at Zaandam. The light isn’t as obvious as it could be, and the painting draws the viewer, making you seek out the warmth of the sun. I don’t know that all kids will have patience for this book, but for parents who take the extra effort and encourage their kids to just look and not get impatient, I suspect this book could become a requested favorite.

Then there’s the "let’s sneak art in" book, Mitzi’s World: Seek and Discover More Than 150 Details in 15 Works of Folk Art. by Deborah Raffin and paintings by Jane Wooster Scott. Mitzi is a charming black and white little dog wearing a red collar, traisping through some really lovely folk art paintings. The objects to find vary from easy to a little more challenging. I particularly like the catchy rhymes that direct the reader on what to search for. Not only are there many things to look, but all the seasons are represented as are different settings, country, farm, city, etc. Kids who might be a little young for the Where’s Waldo books will love this, as will parents and grandparents who favor folk art  There is some really great end matter that explains the different styles of folk art and asks what kind of styles were used in the book. 

Lastly, there is a book for older kids, Looking at Pictures: An Introduction to Art for Young People, Revised Edition by Joy Richardson. This book uses art from the renowned British National Gallery. The layout of the book is from the prospective of filling and organizing a gallery. Children who may be thought of more as inventors will actually pore over this book. There are fascinating details on restoration, repairs and using modern techniques to learn more about each piece. Charlotte Voake has added illustrations throughout to point the reader toward some informational tidbit or art technique. This book is a great sampling of what the world of art history can hold — it’s not just old paintings, there are stories to be told. Each choice of the artist has a reason and they are presented with humor and insight that will make the curious want to know more.

I certainly wish my exposure to the great works of art had started when I was a baby. How lucky kids are today to have such riches before them. And I’m keeping my review copies of these books because they’re everything I wanted from Art History but never got — the fun stuff.

We’re currently conducting an interesting exercise at Wellesley Booksmith that I thought some of you might like to participate in as well. This October marks the 10th anniversary of our store’s opening, and as such our front window will be featuring our staff’s individual selections of the best book each of us has read in the last 10 years. (Not the best book published in the last 10 years, mind you, the best book we’ve each READ in the last 10 years. This means we don’t have to get picky about publication dates!) We plan on asking our customers to write to us about their "best in 10" choices too, and will publish their responses in our store’s biweekly newsletter — one or more per week for the next year, just to keep the celebration going. 

I’m going to keep this post very short, because I know what’s happening right now — the jukebox of your brain is flipping rapidly through its ENORMOUS storehouse of titles, as you try (what a challenge!) to decide which book is the best YOU’VE read in the last 10 years. I myself have had at least 48 hours to ponder this question and… I’m still debating. My current frontrunner is Jim the Boy by Tony Earley, but I waver every few minutes, thinking maybe I should replace it with another favorite, of which I’ve simply got TOO many!

But how about you? Can you narrow the available choices down to just ONE book you would feel comfortable calling "the best book you’ve read in the past 10 years?" If so, please tell us what it is and (if you want to enlighten us still further) why that was the one you chose!

Last night, I was all set to work on my post about the change in bookstore shopping patterns with kids in school. I work on a laptop. I love my computer — it’s easy, it’s portable and the keys light up when it’s dark. I love my laptop except when I accidently dump a microbrew on the keyboard. It was a sad, sad moment when I realized that not only was my keyboard no longer lighting up, my entire computer practically sizzled to darkness. Compounding the problem was my eagerness to dry the computer off, with a hair dryer (not something I recommend) which caused me to literally melt four keys off my keyboard. So, now I am staying at work late to recreate my blog post.

I wanted to talk about the change in kids and shopping patterns now that school has started again. The biggest change for the Flying Pig is that for the first month or two of high school, we seldom see our usual teenage readers. I feel bad for them. They have so much homework, they have no time to read for pleasure. Throw sports practice in the mix and sometimes we don’t see these kids until Christmas break. While there is a dearth of adolescents, there is a fairly large upswing in newly emergent readers.

This time of year our sales of leveled readers and chapter books goes up. I’m stunned anew at how quickly kids learn to read and how fast they can progress from a struggling reader to a fluent one in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. Parents are happy — thrilled usually — to support their new reader and start building a library of "read-alone" books when the time comes. What I like about this age is the kids are expressing opinions about what they’d like to read by themselves and what they still want read to them. As the nights get cooler and dark descends earlier, the tradition of families reading together can really take hold without the distraction of summer’s light and activity.

Parents come in the store and can actually browse at their leisure. There are no kids pulling them in different directions, no little ones demanding attention during the school day, so they can take sometime to be thouhgtful about the books they will add to the home library for the kids and themselves. These browsing adults suddenly want harder books to read. Gone, very rapidly, are the lighter books of summer. It always amazes me how quickly people’s reading shifts when the weather changes. I suspect a lot of that is driven by the great adult releases of the fall. (And if you’re not aware, this fall is shaping up to be one of the best I’ve seen in all my years of bookselling.)  I guess as the kids go back to school, parents can find the time to read.

Teachers, of course, come in to fill out their classroom libraries. What I love about this is that the teachers take the time to get to know their students and then they come in to supplement their libraries. Teachers with a list thrill me. They’re organized and I really just have to point them in the right section and they’re filling their baskets.

And finally, the last category of shopper here in New England is the leaf peeper. They come to see the leaves change color. These guys generally plan ahead. While the leaves haven’t started to change yet, the peepers are already here, waiting. And buying Christmas presents.

Yes, it’s true, ShelfTalker blogger extraordinaire Alison Morris is getting married this weekend! Exactly a year to the day of her engagement, our lovely Alison is marrying the very talented illustrator Gareth Hinds. Really, never have two people been so well suited to each other. We’re already envious of the library these two will have, not to mention the craft center. It makes us very happy, and awfully sentimental, when two people do the right thing and decide to spend the rest of their lives together, like you know they should.
The happy couple on their engagement day.

Please join us in wishing Alison and Gareth a long and happy life together!

Hoo boy, have I got a great list of books to share with you!
Ever since the August 27 ShelfTalker post, Where’s Ramona Quimby, Black and Pretty?, I’ve been immersed in the ongoing conversation about—and search for—contemporary books featuring kids of color that aren’t primarily about race. The response to that post was terrific, a heartening reassurance that a lot of people throughout the industry care deeply about this issue. But I also heard from so many authors and illustrators, teachers and librarians, booksellers, editors and publishers, all working toward a similar goal, who have been “shouting into the wind” far too long, trying to draw attention to these books and the need for more of them. That’s frustrating and disheartening.
The good news:
a) The Internet has enabled public gathering places (like this blog and many, many others), where cross-cultural communication is so much easier than it used to be. (“Cross-cultural” here refers to bookselling, teaching, library, publishing, artist, author, etc., cultures, although the other meanings are also applicable.) Getting the word out about great books featuring kids of color can hit mainstream channels, if we all take care to do it.

b) There are some really great titles out there. From my own research and the many helpful resources people have shared with me since the post, we’ve got a very promising list of new and recent titles featuring contemporary kids and families of color where race is not the main issue. The 2009 list is growing, there are some 2010 titles on their way, and I’ve added a large pre-2009 section. More on this in a moment.
c) The world is changing. As the U.S. population continues to diversify, so will books. (If there are any actual books left, that is. Ha ha. Ouch.) Soon, soon, I hope, publishers and illustrators won’t think twice about including kids of color as a matter of course in their illustrations and book covers, avoiding the “one Asian, one Caucasian (usually placed centrally, and/or larger than, the other characters), and one black kid” triumvirate that doesn’t really do anything except trumpet the fact that the book is trying to be politically correct via a cliché image.
A corollary to this is that some day soon, marketing departments will need to stop doing an end-run around the cover-art question. By this I mean the attempt to overcome the (lamentably very real) challenge of selling book covers to white audiences by obscuring or omitting race from book covers. They may show characters from the back, or blur them, or use such extreme facial closeups it’s hard to work out race, or use only the white character on the front cover of a book that equally features a character of color. The new cover of E.L. Konigsburg’s Newbery Honor book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth (shown at left) goes this route, and the image has a lively quality, but it ignores the heart of the book: the friendship between Jennifer and Elizabeth. I’m not sure my nine- or ten-year-old self would have picked up the new cover, but the original image (shown at right) drew me in immediately. As an adult, it made me sad to see that Jennifer, the dominant figure in the friendship, had disappeared from the 2007 edition, and to think about the probable reasons for that decision.
I understand the impulse, and often, it works—not only because of latent (or blatant) racism, but because book covers have shaped reader expectations. As Carol Chittenden astutely pointed out in her comment on the Ramona Quimby blog post, perhaps part of the problem lies in what readers have grown accustomed to expect from books with kids of color on the cover: “I would have to voice some sympathy with publishers who soft-pedal skin color in cover designs. I often see older customers’ faces cloud over when I present such great books as Elijah of Buxton, and they dismiss it with, ‘I don’t think he’d relate to that one. What else can you show me?’ Kids seem to have far less of a problem with that, and when the cover figures are a group, a mix doesn’t seem to be an issue. There’s such a strong assumption that if the character on the cover is dark-skinned, the book is about race.”
I think we have a chance here to continue changing public perception. We need to keep talking, and back up our words with actions. Let’s not make lazy assumptions about what kids will and won’t read, and what adults will and won’t consider buying. This goes all the way from authors and illustrators to agents and editors, publishers and marketing departments, then booksellers, teachers, and librarians. If we all shift a little, a lot can happen.
d) Editors tell me they are looking for great books featuring kids of color, and not just for historical fiction. Some have told me they aren’t getting many good manuscripts fitting this description. To me, this means that agents need to step up to the plate and rep those authors and illustrators of color whose work they love but haven’t represented for fear the market won’t buy. The market is already here; we just have to reach it.
And now for the books that DO exist: TA-DAH!! Our WORLD FULL OF COLOR list.
There are lots of great books, I’m happy to say. Not enough, by a long shot, but this discussion has brought to light dozens of 2009 titles and scores of pre-2009 titles, not to mention a nice starting handful of 2010 titles.
I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours on this list, tracking down books, adding titles and tags and trying to find the best way to catalog and list them. Grateful thanks to all of you who wrote in with title suggestions, publishing links, and book-review sites specializing in books by and about people of color.
After trying several different options, I finally chose LibraryThing.com to host our book list. You can use it without having to register, it’s incredibly flexible, it provides book covers even in the printable version of the lists, and it allows users to add their own comments, tags, and book information to the book records. It acts like a Wiki without the learning curve. You can sort and organize the books in a myriad of ways. Josie tells me I’d bore you to sobs trying to explain all the cool things LibraryThing can do, so I’ll just provide the link and let you guys check it out. It’s very intuitive. You’re welcome to ask me questions in the comments section here.
Please keep in mind that this is a work-in-progress, and that I’m sure I’ve made some tagging whoopsies along the way, particularly with the categorization of 48+-page books that don’t quite fit our usual definitions of picture books, early readers, or chapter books. Feel free to email me with corrections — or, better yet, make them yourselves in the Common Knowledge section of each book. I think I also went a little nuts and included some titles that are more about race and ethnic heritage than the original intent of this list. But better to err on the side of inclusivity, I think.
Finally, please let me know when you come across more books that fit the bill, and I’ll add them to LibraryThing.
In the meantime, for two extremely thoughtful, lively articles about race, check out Mitali Perkins’s blog post about race and class in The Hunger Games, and Newsweek‘s article about how well-intentioned parents who never mention race to their children are actually contributing to racism. The article is called “See Baby Discriminate: Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color. What’s a parent to do?” and it’s an eye-opener.
Thanks for continuing the conversation. You can also link to the library here: