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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Children's books

  
 
Cat Chant
12:13 / 01.07.03
The term "children's books" is being thrown around a lot at the moment, so I thought it might be useful to have a thread where we talked/thought about what's actually at stake in the term.

One of the ways I'm seeing it used most often at the moment (here and in RL) is to defend a particular book against criticism on two different grounds:

(1) the critic is "an adult" and thus has no access to a "child's" reading of the book, so hir opinions are not valid since children's books are meant to be read "by children". This one seems to me to be confusing a generic statement - "this book is an example of the genre 'children's literature'" - with an empirical/marketing observation - 'this book is marketed at/mostly read by people who happen to be children'. So that seems to me to be potentially an interesting topic - the relation between chlit as a genre and children as a market/social group/relatively powerless subculture.

(2) The critic is taking the book too seriously - or, more generally, the wrong expectations are being brought to bear on the book. Obviously there's something to this: just as it would be stupid to criticize, say, Beowulf for giving away the murderer too early, it is stupid to bring the standards of the genre "adult literary fiction" to children's literature without at least thinking about whether they apply. However, one thing that intrigues me here is that, from time to time, this is used to defend the thoughtless and/or trivial use of a theme that one would expect to be treated seriously and thoughtfully in most genres of adult literature - abusive adult-child relations; war; murder; slavery; etc. (Again, some of this is due to generic requirements: a psychological adult novel about the aftereffects of bereavement in childhood will have a different take on it than, say, James and the Giant Peach)

That's it for the moment. This is designed to be some sort of starting point for a joint consideration/discussion of children's books as a genre: the sorts of world that they can conjure up and how they work differently from adult books; or anything else anyone can think of, I guess.

Finally, I'm abstracting this out of the Harry Potter discussions partly because I know I find it very hard to be clear and civil when talking about those books, so although obviously examples from HP might be relevant and useful here, I myself would be grateful if this didn't immediately become a Rowling-specific thread - what about Lemony Snicket? Helen Cresswell? Philip "Parable of Heterosexuality" Pullman?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:53 / 01.07.03
The term 'children's books' always strikes me as rather ridiculous. The problem is the lack of any other that comes to mind. Such ridiculousness follows works such as Pullman's HDM. Marketed as chlit in order to reach a larger audience the trilogy in no way seems to read as belonging to that genre. Characters of a certain age should not automatically indicate that a book should be directed towards an audience of that age and neither should magic automatically lead to the categorisation 'fantasy' yet books are consistently marketed in this way.

the critic is "an adult" and thus has no access to a "child's" reading of the book, so hir opinions are not valid since children's books are meant to be read "by children".

I find this type of attitude more confused than anything else. Adults, I think we can safely say, will have a different opinion of a story but just as valid and possibly closer to that of the author.

I'd like to use Anne Fine as an example of a children's writer gone strangely wrong. She wrote some beautifully insightful books aimed at children of between, I suppose, 8 and 12. On her transferral to the wild and serious land of adult's fiction she became, for want of a better word, trashy. Her tone when addressing adults through her novels came across as far more patronising and her subject matter became confused. It's difficult to decipher not what this means for the author but what it means when taken hand in hand with the genre of chlit. It certainly can't be perceived as a negative thing if you are an adult looking to defend the genre but whether it is generally positive is quite another question?
 
 
HCE
20:44 / 01.07.03
I've gone back and read books I enjoyed as a child. They don't feel particularly different. I suppose that when you're 10 you're looking for a certain level of fantasy in even a realistic book, because life is itself rather fantastic. Didn't you ever think that you could talk to animals? Or that people could read your mind? I think that so long as children's books are approached with the literary equivalent of a willing suspension of disbelief, they will either succeed or fail on fair grounds. Most children are not really looking for literature that is profound so much as as engaging.

Actually Haruki Murakami's books give me the same sort of satisfaction.
 
 
HCE
20:48 / 01.07.03
Can we also talk about gay children's lit here? I never quite understood if you (Deva) meant literature with gay children in it, or literature to be read by children who are gay.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:53 / 03.07.03
Or children's books that should be read by gay adults, or indeed gay fiction that should be read by children, of course.

I have a slighlty odd approach to children's books because I didn't read them as a child very much at all; it's only more recently that I have discovered children's fiction, working backwards from teen to younger. At the moment, as the world devours Potter, I am on the Dalemark Quartet, which is almost classically children's fiction - the narrative is clear and uncomplicated, and expands out from page 1 to slot back together on the final page. This may not be a generic feature unique to children's lit, but I do think it's a factor.

Which doesn't help identify either what a children's book is or whether that should affect how we critique it. Certainly if I am reading a children's book I tend to apply a different set of criteria - one fo the mistakes being made in the latest Harry Potter thread is that its champions are arguing that it is foolish to complain that a children's book is failing to fulfil one's expectations of an adult book's writing. One might say in response that that Rowling fails to create characters or plots of a depth and credibility suitable to be counted as decent children's fiction.

So, children's fiction - I think it can certainly be judged with a critical toolkit something akin to the "standard" toolkit - there are no children's books, and no adult books - there are good books and bad books. When I read genuinely good children's books I tend to be of that mind. Conversely, other books fulfil different generic demands - while I would argue that the "Making Out" series are superior teen romances, I am aware that as a teen romance they are unlikely to do certain things; to demand that they do so is a bit like demanding Robert Rankin metacomedy from E. Anne Proulx; again, different genres.

I *do* think marketing is terribly important, although not in quite the same way that I think Deva may be conceptualising it, but I'm a bit fuzzy on that part.. will have a think about it.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
20:38 / 03.07.03
Perhaps we (some of us, especially in the HP thread) are looking at this the wrong way round, and children's literature is a genre in itself which is not defined by the groups of its writers and readers. I say this because the following statements are so clearly unsatisfactory:

'Children's literature consists of books read by children'

'Children's literature consists of books written for children'

The latter is perhaps less immediately problematic than the former, but I think there are many books which we might call children's literature which were not written specifically for children - Ender's Game, for example, or The Rose and the Ring.

It might therefore be easier to look at 'children's literature' in terms of the components of the genre: rites of passage; use of topoi taken from myth; usually a fairly defined structure, which is often linear; high importance attached to plot; some sort of independence from the adult world; etc., etc. (I am probably skating over the surface of some rather thin ice here, but this is really just intended as a note). Books can then be discussed in terms of how good they are with reference to this genre type. That way we could avoid some of the 'you know, for kids' problems and concentrate on whether or not the book is actually good or not - or, if you will, well-written or badly-written.

Whether a child would discriminate in the same way is an entirely different matter, and should probably be left to the child. I know that, when I was a nipper, I loved a lot of books which I now think (and may have thought at the time) are really pretty rotten: but I didn't care.

(N.B. it may also be worth considering exactly who we mean by 'children' here - are we including teenagers who might constitute the audience for 'Young Adult' books? Reading, it seems to me, is not a linear process - one doesn't progress automatically from picture-book to children's book to YA book to adult novel; even within the limits of fiction one visits and revisits different books over time)
 
  
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