A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  It took a trio of fictional characters to convince me that I could survive the move to womanhood, and their names were Jo, Anne, and Laura. I kept the library’s copies of Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House books in constant circulation.

  Despite the constraints experienced by women in those times and places, all three protagonists retained a strong sense of self as they matured. Oh, they changed; no doubt about that. They married, had children, left childish ways behind. But I could tell that Plumfield’s Mrs. Jo was still as impulsive and determined as she had been in Little Women. When an older Laura in Little Town on the Prairie rocked a desk furiously to protest a teacher’s unjust treatment of her younger sister, I recognized the feisty little girl who had dragged in the Ingallses’ entire woodpile to prepare for a storm. And when the talkative orphan in Anne of Green Gables grew up to become the chatelaine of Ingleside, she kept the same sense of humor, the same delight in nature, the same independence of thought.

  If my fictional friends could move into the adult world without losing themselves, I, too, might be able to keep myself. Like Jo, Anne, and Laura, I could stride bravely into womanhood. And so I did.

  MORE GREAT GIRL BOOKS

  Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy

  262 pp. Grades 4–6. Along with their loving but preoccupied botanist father and clumsy dog, the motherless Penderwick sisters spend a summer in the Berkshires. Suffused with affectionate humor, this charming, old-fashioned story feels familiar in the way the best books seem like old friends. In the sequel, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Birdsall again delivers genuinely funny scenes and tender moments.

  Meg Cabot, Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls: Glitter Girls and the Great Fake Out

  199 pp. Grades 3–5. Allie is thrilled to attend a twirling competition with her best friends — until she finds out that “frenemy” Brittany is having a glamorous birthday party on the same day. Cabot provides a gentle way to learn that you should “always be true to your friends, just as you are to yourself,” in this typically funny and age-appropriate series entry.

  Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword

  142 pp. Grades 4–6. Eleven-year-old Mirka Herschberg, a Hasidic Jew, is not your average dragon-slaying heroine. The Shabbat-observing protagonist finds herself first battling a furious talking pig, then competing in a knitting contest against a troll. This graphic novel is laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly engrossing.

  Shannon Hale and Dean Hale, illustrations by Nathan Hale, Rapunzel’s Revenge

  144 pp. Grades 5–8. In this gutsy graphic novel, Rapunzel is a spunky, (hair-) whip-toting cowgirl. She joins with rapscallion Jack to rescue her mother and end her wicked stepmother’s reign. Full of high action, sensory thrills, and amusing wisecracking.

  Kate Klise, Grounded

  196 pp. Grades 4–6. After Daralynn’s father and siblings die in a plane crash, her angry mother, a stylist for a funeral home, lets her daughter out of the house only to assist at work. When Clem’s Crematorium threatens Mom’s livelihood, Daralynn decides to investigate the owner. Told from Daralynn’s entertainingly candid perspective, this is an improbably lighthearted mystery.

  Cynthia Lord, Touch Blue

  186 pp. Grades 4–6. Tess,who lives on a small Maine island, is excited when her family decides to foster a child, but thirteen-year-old Aaron is not exactly thrilled to be there. Tess’s narration gives readers a real feeling for island life, while her sense of humor keeps things light.

  Lauren Tarshis, Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree

  199 pp. Grades 4–7. Hyper-rational seventh-grader Emma-Jean doesn’t understand her classmates’ illogical behavior. This gently probing book tackles tween-relevant issues with sensitivity and skill.

  Jacqueline Wilson, illustrations by Nick Sharratt, Candyfloss

  339 pp. Grades 3–6. Preteen Floss adores her down-on-his-luck dad and decides to stay with him when Mum, stepfather, and baby brother move to Australia for six months. Comic-strip panels introduce each chapter, setting tone, illustrating Floss’s feelings, and extending the action.

  Jacqueline Woodson, After Tupac & D Foster

  151 pp. Grades 5–7. A tone of fierce warmth and closeness permeates this novel about two black girls — best friends — whose mothers don’t allow them to leave their block in 1994 Queens. Woodson eloquently limns the duo and their community in this ruminative, bittersweet novel.

  Will Hobbs begins his 2008 Go Big or Go Home with a bang — literally, as a meteorite crashes through the roof into fourteen-year-old Brady’s bedroom: “It was heavy, and almost too hot to handle, as well it might be after blazing a fiery hole through the atmosphere. We’d been hit by an intruder from outer space! I couldn’t think of anything cooler that had happened in my entire life.” Christened “Fred” by Brady and his best-bud cousin, Quinn, the meteorite leads the boys through all manner of adventure involving neighboring bullies and their Turkish war dog, Attila, “extreme” bicycle riding through the Black Hills, fishing, spelunking, an astrobiologist named Rip Ripley, and a space virus that gives Brady near-superpowers before putting him into a paralysis that the doctor mistakes for death. Awesome!

  Go Big or Go Home is unmistakably a “boy book,” and Hobbs is one of the most reliable practitioners of the genre. This is not to say that girls won’t read it or that boys read nothing else. Instead, “boy book” means a story that might appeal to boys who otherwise won’t voluntarily pick up a novel.

  Concern over boys reading is perennial: what they read, why they don’t, whether it matters. Part of the problem, though, is the way the debate gets framed: by adult, largely female teachers and librarians who define reading by what and how they themselves read. Boys read plenty (magazines, online news, for example), but as a group they read fewer books and less fiction than girls do. It’s a distinction maintained right through adulthood.

  But thank goodness for do-gooders, because the zeal with which librarians and teachers have tried to turn boys into fiction readers has resulted in some of children’s literature’s most boy- and girl-friendly first-class novels.

  What makes a book a “boy book” rather than a book about a boy? I think Hobbs has it right in his title: Go Big or Go Home. What reluctant readers want are big plots, big themes, and lots of action focused on a hero the reader could imagine himself being, with maybe just a little work. Gary Paulsen’s Brian, forsaken in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but a Hatchet, is an ordinary boy of whom great things are demanded. So is Harry Potter.

  In Louis Sachar’s Holes, Stanley Yelnats, sent to a boys’ prison camp for a crime he didn’t commit, is tubby, ordinary — and afflicted with more than a palindromic name. He attributes his misfortune to a family curse, first placed upon his great-great-grandfather for failing to keep his promise to carry the one-legged fortune-teller Madame Zeroni up the mountain to the life-giving spring. That was way-back-when in Latvia, but even in Stanley’s contemporary Texas, the curse comes back in all its power — until Stanley closes the circle. At once a tense tale of survival and a poker-faced shaggy-dog story, and written in a laconic style that leaves plenty of, er, holes for the reader to fill in, Holes is the rare book that found critical acclaim, popular appeal, and instant entry into the canon. It was a boy book for everybody.

  While habitual readers enjoy and are at ease with books along a spectrum that includes the ruminative and low-key, occasional readers want a bang for their buck. And for their time: when reading isn’t easy, and when it’s freighted with others’ expectations of you, you want to feel that it’s worth what you probably think of as a sacrifice.

  At the risk of overindulging Dr. Freud, “bigness” is important to boy books. If you don’t read very much, you want to feel that what you do read is Important. The bigness can be expressed in length, like the Harry Potter books, or in an elaborate structure, as in Holes, or in the ideas — think of the generations
of brainy boys who have sustained the science-fiction industry. Big ideas can also operate on a smaller scale, as in Andrew Clements’s string of best sellers about elementary school life. In his Frindle, a boy sets out to add a new word to the dictionary and succeeds; in Lunch Money, a boy builds a publishing empire from his and his classmates’ spare change.

  Clements’s books star girls as often as boys, and it’s important to note that the presence of a female main character is not in itself a deterrent to reluctant boy readers. Harry Potter’s Hermione proved that. What these reluctant readers don’t want are books filled with interpersonal emotional drama that propels the plots of such girl favorites as Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice books (see “Everygirl,” page 247) or Ann Brashares’s Traveling Pants series. It’s not that boy readers are afraid of emotions, exactly, it’s that they want to feel them in service to high stakes — like a gun, in Walter Dean Myers’s Scorpions, or a mutiny, as in Avi’s True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a boy book about a girl. Or in controlling the world, as in Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond–like Alex Rider series. Boys like to think Big.

  Brian Selznick, an illustrator who frequently collaborates with Andrew Clements, won the 2008 Caldecott Medal with a boy book par excellence. While the Caldecott Medal, for “most distinguished picture book of the year,” generally goes to a book of thirty-two pages, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is 534 pages long, with 158 pictures and 26,159 words. (The provision of this information by the narrator is evidence of the book’s understanding of one thing boys like to get from a book: facts and statistics, preferably ones involving large numbers.) The book begins in a way that even the most reluctant of readers can appreciate: with twenty-one consecutive wordless double-page spreads. Beginning with a close-up of the moon, the pictures move down to the skyline of 1931 Paris, where dawn is beginning to break and a boy is walking, then running, through a train station. Is that a secret entrance? Yes. The boy goes behind the wall to spy, through a peephole cut into a clock, on an old man with a small stall of toys. The text finally begins: “From his perch behind the clock, Hugo could see everything.”

  The story that proceeds from there is complicated but speedy: Hugo has a broken handwriting automaton left by his late father, and he’s been pilfering parts from the toy vendor in order to make it work. The message the restored automaton delivers only deepens the mystery, which involves the real-life early special-effects wizard/filmmaker Georges Méliès. Relying on text to convey conversation and motivation, and pictures to convey the considerable action, Hugo Cabret mimics the style of the early silent films, which alternated moving images with title cards to tell a story. The separation of pages where you look and pages where you read stimulates both ways of following the story (literally: there are some great chase scenes), and both its novelty value and textual breaks contribute to the book’s attractiveness.

  As any fifth-grade teacher will tell you, boys are jumpy, their brains as well as their limbs. Novelty both stimulates and soothes them, thus the perennial boy appeal of joke books (see “Banana Peels at Every Step”) and Guinness World Records, a presage of the Internet that allows you to go from fact to fact to fact in a direction determined by the reader rather than by the book. Fiction fans (which, remember, include most of the people involved in teaching and encouraging a boy to read) don’t always understand this pleasure in random facts, but what they need to know is that the boy so inclined is making up the story for himself, just as he does when scrutinizing a map or the statistics on a ball game or player.

  Not every reader likes fiction. Many boys (and men) comfortable with paragraphed text still prefer nonfiction: biographies, history, how-to books, or books about science. Marc Aronson speaks to that in his essay on nonfiction (“Cinderella Without the Fairy Godmother”), but also bear in mind that these readers are likely to go beyond the offerings of bound books in search of disparate sources of information that can be put together like Legos by the reader. There’s a difference, some boys will insist, between being interested in dinosaurs and being interested in reading about dinosaurs, which only looks like a distinction without a difference to a reader.

  Your best chance of getting a non-book reader to value books is to show him what books can do that other media cannot. While the Internet contains more information, useless and otherwise, than Guinness, that book remains one of the most popular in the world and derives its considerable status and lucrative spinoff franchises because it is a book. It has boundaries and a defined scope. It is printed: no take-backs until the next year’s edition. Specious or not, it has authority and gets respect. It has the last word. Expert, true, definitive, big: books are really good at being all these things.

  Two bogus books I found in a public library a week apart when I was young are the reason I write novels for teenage boys. I am forever grateful.

  Back in the forties and fifties, my dad took me and my sister to the library every week. We could take out as many books as we could carry, and he never censored our choices.

  I found the first bogus book in the science section, where I often trolled for sex ed books. After a quick peek inside for revealing pictures, The New You and Heredity looked promising. I tucked it in the middle of my usual stack to check out: Steinbeck, John R. Tunis, Spanish explorer epics.

  I read The New You and Heredity under the covers with a flashlight in case I found what I was looking for. But before that naked lady could show up, I came across the “masculinity chart.”

  Standing atop the chart were test pilots, engineers, and athletes. At the bottom were teachers, librarians, and writers. Even then, I knew which end of the chart I was headed toward. And I believed the chart was true. It was in a book, something I dreamed of writing someday. And it was about science, something of which I knew nothing but its infallible power. (It would be a long time before I found out that junk books and junk science are not necessarily oxymorons.)

  I was in despair. Just as I was coming into the age when boys start wondering what it takes to be a real man, I had proof I’d never make it. I wanted to talk it over with Dad, but he was a teacher. I didn’t want to make him feel bad.

  Even now, I can’t laugh at that long, miserable week. The battle of boyhood is tough enough without a bad book sneering at your future.

  But I hadn’t given up hope. The following week, when I returned The New You and Heredity to the library, I began searching the shelves in sections I rarely visited. It was in the travel section that I found The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton.

  His energy and enthusiasm lifted my spirits. I was particularly taken by the way he would swim across crocodile-infested waters with a typewriter strapped to his back and a knife in his teeth. He’d carve up anything that tried to stop him. And then he’d write about it. Even then, I didn’t totally buy his stories, and now they seem as spurious as the masculinity chart. But they throbbed with possibility.

  When I finally returned that book several months later — I kept renewing it — I swaggered past the science shelves. Just try to put Richard at the bottom of your dumb chart, old New You. He’ll carve his way to the top. And I’ll be right behind him.

  As far as I can recall, I did not have a clear sense of “boy” or “girl” reading as a child. I enjoyed the books we were assigned in school, especially the nonfiction, like Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey (the book that taught me the meaning of ecology) and Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (a beautiful book on otters). But my sense of reading changed the summer I was eleven, going on twelve.

  I was at Camp Thoreau, as Red Diaper a camp as could be. Two of the counselors were Robbie and Mike Meeropol (the astute reader will recognize them as the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). I believe Paul Robeson’s grandson was there. We sang “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and believed in disarmament. I distinctly recall being in a common room with older kids who were reading the publications of Youth Against War and Fascism, one of which included the Port Huron Statemen
t — the founding document of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the very personification of the New Left.

  That summer, though, neither science nor politics held my attention. A boy a few years older than me introduced me to APBA. We never knew what the initials stood for, but these were cards filled with numbers, derived from the actual stats of a baseball player (we played teams from the previous year, but you could also buy famous teams, such as the 1927 Yankees). You rolled a pair of dice and looked at what that roll meant for your batter; then, depending on the defensive points of the nine players your opponent had selected, you knew what had happened. I still remember that seven was a single, and if there was a runner on first, he reached third and the batter advanced to second on the throw. Six was a double, twelve a home run.

  That summer, I found reading numbers to be an emotional experience. That summer, I learned that numbers can carry a whole narrative, that numbers can be devastating. That summer cured me of any impulse to gamble — it hurt too much to lose. That summer I began to love not just playing sports but poring over stats and picturing what they meant.

  I did not stop reading the books we were assigned in school. And I joined a socialist party (I think it was the Socialist Workers). But what really happened to me that summer was that for the first time I felt the terrifying power of sports stats — the scorecard of life. I truly hated losing; I yearned to win. Only as an adult would I look back on that summer and think of what I was doing as “boy” reading. To me, then, it was the whole world, everything, on the roll of a die and a number on a card.

  P.S. This morning my older son was waiting in line with the other six- and seven-year-olds for the bus to take him to school. He had a pack of shiny new baseball cards. Soon the line turned into a huddle — every boy pressing to get in closer, to catch a glimpse of those amazing numbers: I could hear them chattering away about lifetime stats. I was seeing in the twenty-first century precisely what I recalled from 1962: avid, passionate boy reading.