Hot Girl Review

Meet Kate, a girl who's a lot harder than her super vanilla name suggests. She's already been in and out of a gang, plus a couple foster homes, by the time the story starts. But she's trying to stay on track. The problem is, her brainy best friend is in South Africa for the summer, so she doesn't have any trustworthy people to hang with.

So she ends up hanging with Naleejah. Naleejah has Gucci bags, great hair, and lots of guys. Interestingly, Kate's not impressed by that. She spends most of the story being disgusted with Naleejah, but she can't quite extricate herself from the "friendship," because she keeps accepting Naleejah's offers to do her hair and let her borrow better clothes. Especially on days when she expects to see a certain guy.

So here's my question. I found the story to be a little didactic, but do I just need to get over that? I love YA books that are ambivalent about truth, that don't honor the authority of adults, and that raise more questions than they answer. But lots of tales of urban, African-American teens eschew ambivalence--this is something discussed in the Hornbook article, "And Stay Out of Trouble." So if an author sets out to write something between a cautionary tale and an inspirational story, should I evaluate the book on the basis of how well the author succeeds?

Grading Yourself with the Fuse #8 Poll

Elizabeth Bird has been laboring over the results of the 100 Best Children's Novels Poll and has finally put a nice bow on it. But the discussion continues. Lots of bloggers, starting I think with Teacherninja, have been reporting on the number of books on the list that they've read and giving themselves a grade. Meanwhile, Debbie Reese has begun the project of pointing out all the problematic portrayals of Native Americans in the novels.

This relates to a larger issue: the list has very few examples of books by or about people of color. This isn't really surprising, because lo these many years, books by and about white people have been getting published and winning Newbery awards and getting assigned by classroom teachers much more often than books (imagine all the unpublished--even unwritten ones!) by people of color. In fact, in the last issue of Hornbook, there was a wonderful article about being black and growing up reading books like The Secret Garden.

Also, the CCBC has been collecting data on the number of books by and about people of color that are published in the US, and it's distressing. Here's just a sample:

Year	Total Number of Books Published (Est.)	Number of Books Received at CCBC	African / African Americans		American Indians		Asian Pacifics/ Asian Pacific Americans		Latinos
			By	About	By	About	By	About	By	About
2007	5,000	3,000	77	150	6	44	56	68	42	59

So it's not surprising, to me, to find that most of the people who participated in Elizabeth Bird's poll have read and liked more books by and about white people. So--how helpful!--the Fuse #8 poll reveals the bias in our field. But it also reinforces it. At least it does if our response is to use it as an assessment tool rather than looking at it as an interesting snapshot.

Naturally, I have a solution. After the jump are all of the chapter books on the CCBC's 50 Multicultural Books Every Child Should Know. There are ten. (How perfect!) So give yourself 10 points for each of the following that you have read. Now average that with your Fuse #8 grade. Now you have a grade which is adjusted for white bias. This is obviously mathematically suspect, but entertaining, no?

Hello, Marvelous World!

I've been reading a pretty sweet blog: White Readers Meet Black Authors. I mean, if you're white and you know that you usually read white authors, how can you resist a blog with this address: http://welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/?

That's how I found Wench, which I'm in the middle of. It focuses on the lives of four women, living in slavery in the South, who are forced to play the role of mistress with the white men who own them. The setting glistens hot on the page, and the characters have to make impossible choices: attempt to run away, abandoning their children and possibly endangering the lives of the slaves who remain behind? or stay in slavery, subjecting themselves to the abuse of the men and the venom of the women, hoping to convince the white men to set their children free?

Well. There's absolutely no possible transition after that. But more relevant-to-children's literature, White Readers Meet Black Authors today had a reminder about Marvelous World by Troy CLE. I ordered the first book back when Vibe magazine was calling it the black Harry Potter, and the author was already imagining the films. And then I thought it fizzled. Not so!

The series has continued, the new covers look great, and there's a book trailer!

Usurper of the Sun (Sort of) Book Review

I think I'm kind of not exactly going to finish Usurper of the Sun. Not because it's not good! And not because it's hard sci-fi!

OK, probably sort of because it's hard sci-fi. But I don't have a tiny brain, really. I think the questions the novel raises are interesting. For example: If you were going to try to communicate to aliens the concept of friendship, how would you do it? Forget about the technical aspects of sending out messages into the unknown. What images would you use? What if the aliens don't eat together? What if they don't communicate verbally? What if they don't use physical touch to show affection? What if they're like ants or microorganisms and their relationships aren't based on feelings? Tricky, huh?

So I learned a new word: Xenopsychology. Alien psychology.

But the book disappointed me in a way that has nothing to do with the genre or the quality of the writing. This was the first Haikasoru book that arrived, fully cataloged, at my library, and I was hoping it would appeal to teens. The blurb goes thus:

Aki Shiraishi is a high school student working in the astronomy club and one of the few witnesses to an amazing event—someone is building a tower on the planet Mercury. Soon, the Builders have constructed a ring around the sun, threatening the ecology of Earth with an immense shadow. Aki is inspired to pursue a career in science, and the truth. She must determine the purpose of the ring and the plans of its creators, as the survival of both species—humanity and the alien Builders—hangs in the balance.

You can understand why I thought it was going to focus on a teenager, right?

Eisner Nominations for Kids and Teens

First of all, read this book, I beg you:
Second, the Eisner noms were announced--I'm a little late with this, but the winners won't be announced until July. Here are the kids and teens nominations (Bold titles are also on the 2010 GGNFT list):

Nice Stories

I tend to whip kids into a frenzy at my storytimes. I had the same tendency as a babysitter, camp counselor, and classroom teacher, where I learned that the first step in classroom management is managing yourself. I can't figure out, actually, how other people have quiet storytimes. Quiet 4-year-olds creep me out.

And I hate it when adults shush kids over and over, because it's so normal for kids to want to respond to a story by yelling out things like, "I have a pet fish, too!" I like to remind people that Shakespearean theater was punctuated by much less adorable outbursts.

But the problem with high-energy, all-singing, all-dancing storytimes is that I don't get to read the touching, quiet stories. My philosophy has been that those stories are great for intimate reading between parents and children but can't work in a group, in the middle of a one-room library, on a Monday night.


But lately, I've been challenging myself to read those stories, because I think I have to have faith in a good story--forget the finger games and the repeated lines and the instructions to study the illustrations closely so you can hear what the words aren't saying. If librarians won't believe in the power of bare tale-telling, who will?

Maybe it's just a phase

One of those why-boys-don't-read theories that circulates pretty widely is that boys prefer books that awards committees, librarians, and parents (possibly publishers) consider trashy. Books with less character development and more explosions and toilets.

So these books with crazy boy appeal are actually harder for boys to get their hands on, because awards committees, librarians, and parents (who shall henceforth be referred to as literary gatekeepers) are all like, "Oh no, dear, you don't want that nasty book about exploding flatulence, you want this nice book about making friends."

Boys come to the library looking for Captain Underpants and face a wall of Junie B. Jones and Judy Moody books.

But I just read an article that makes a good, related point: it's not really that girls like more sophisticated books. It's just that the literary gatekeepers of America have embraced trashy girl books while still looking down on trashy boy books.