Kiddie Lit and a Rainy Tuesday

The calendar says it is June 9th, but apparently someone forgot to tell the weathermen in New England because I'm still in my old Crossroads for Kids sweatshirt which now seems to be my summer uniform and wondering just what that third pot of coffee (The Crimefighter was home for a time this morning, so I can't take credit for more than half the first pot. The second pot, however....) will do to a girl my age.

It's also raining and is scheduled to be just that way from now until forever, so I'm trapped inside with just me, my books, and two quite stir crazy animals. Not as much fun as it sounds. The Crimefighter is also on hiatus from the office for a few hours, and this always throws my schedule for a loop. I know I waxed all poetic about taking it easy this summer, but it's still hard to look at a man who really is busting his ass from over the top of a book I don't have to be reading. I'm escaping to my office for a time. I love my penniless freedom, but flaunting it during working hours seems a flavor of ass-hattery I wouldn't enjoy being on the receiving end of, so there you have it.

I've reached a reading lull this week. My brain feels sort of fried from all the stuff I'm trying to force into it (Book by Book by Michael Dirda and The Foie Gras Wars by Mark Caro) and all the stuff I'm trying to let seep out (The Devil's Own by Sandra Brown -- whoever recommended that one to me.... really? What did I do to offend you?).

I have a plan in place for when this happens though -- kiddie lit!

Note: I also retreat to kiddie lit when I'm feeling especially put upon by the process of being an adult. Bill paying days and health insurance calls always send me scampering for a little Tamora Pierce, Louis Sachar, or, in happier days, J.K. Rowling. There are others, but these are the names I can read from where I perch at this moment.

I have not only an obsessive history with books, but also a long one. I'm the child of a PhD in Reading who professed (professored?) during the heyday of the emerging young adult market. Unlike most kids, I all but shoved my mom out the door on "business trips" because, unlike my Dad's business trips back to Connecticut which only meant the family was eating out every night he was gone (we'll save the story of my mother's relationship to the kitchen for another, significantly shorter, entry), when my mom returned from her conferences in children's lit, I got swag.

My absolute fondest memories of my childhood would be when my mother returned from those trips. See, this was a different world. I have a cousin who is a children's book author now, and she views conferences as ways to increase sales. They are the literary version of movie press junkets. She sets up a booth and judges her success by the sounds of the cash register and how sore her hand is from signing copies.

In he 70s and even the early 80s, the children's book market was a different animal entirely. My mother returned from these semi-annual jaunts absolutely loaded down with editor's copies and pre-releases of all the greats, most of which she received gratis. Some of my earliest deities, the men and women who would help shape the woman I have become as surely and completely as my folks or any teacher (for good or for ill), would be in attendance. When you have a big old dork for a daughter, as my mother did (and does), shooting the shit with Betsy Byars, Judy Blume (yes.... THE Judy.... I KNOW!!!!) , or Paula Danziger can produce more awe than going up on the space shuttle.

She would arrive home with bags upon bags of books, and I would dump them all over my bedroom floor. Hours would be spent ranking them and piling them into stacks in order of necessity. My parents knew that for the next weeks, no amount of calling would bring me to the dinner table any faster and that it was probably a good idea to put the oldest sheets on my little twin bed because odds were that I was going to burn a hole in them with my flashlight.

These were the days when kids were expected to read and were considered as wide and diverse a market as their adult contemporaries. We had all the types of lit that our parents and teachers had at their fingertips -- from the very very good (yes, I received a first edition of Forever by Judy Blume -- the one with the locket on the front -- at age 8. That might explain some things.) to the very very not so good (Harlequin put out Caprice classics, a line of formulaic romance novels, and Silhouette had a junior readers romance line as well -- in the end, the girl got her boy and her first kiss, thus becoming a woman). I even know that the very first Silhouette series romance was called P.S. I love you and featured a girl vacationing in Palm Springs who gets the bumper sticker (p.s. meaning Palm Springs) but has a romance with a guy named Paul Something-that-starts-with-an-S who gets cancer or something and dies, but she'll always remember him..... there was a sequel too where she meets someone new and falls in love again, but that didn't happen for many many books.

The point is that while many of these books were bad (oh, so bad, and taking up space still in my crowded head), it didn't matter. They were new adventures. I had a lot of advantages as a kid, but my most treasured possessions are my autographed copies of The Cat Ate my Gymsuit and There's a Bat in Bunk Five (which actually says, "Suzy, I'm so glad you liked Cat. Hope you like this one too -- Love, Paula" .... if you just got jealous..... I KNOW!!!)

The closest I can come to that kind of brush with people I admire is a ten minute chat with Pat Conroy (contents of said chat are unmemorable) when my Mom took me to a professor thing when he came to speak at her school when I was in high school -- neither of us impressed the other since his glory days, I even knew then, were over, and I was, you know, a high school kid. He'd written all the weird out of himself, and I knew it even then. There was also my cringe-worthy gushing when I met Greg Mortenson at Northeastern last fall. I think I might have scared him a little -- but then again he was kind of wearing that look whenever he talked to anyone in the room, not just me. I think he wanted all of us to stop talking, take out our checkbooks, and send him the hell back to Pakistan so he could build another school.

Anyway, these were the magicians of my childhood. Danziger taught me to accept my flaws (and to care about others as much as myself, at least some of the time) and Blume taught me what it meant to be a strong woman. The truth about Forever.... is that it doesn't last forever, and you have to be able to look at the girl in the mirror when Forever is over.

I've read some older children's lit and some written recently and tried to see what has changed. Turns out, a lot. A lot of people complain that books today treat children like adults, but I've come to realize that isn't the problem. Books today DO place children in very adult situations and claim to be "writing what the kids live," but books of the past come far closer to treating children like ACTUAL adults, and they are, often, stronger for it.

First I should say that I'm not talking about the best children's books out there. The best have literary merit all their own, and I believe they will hold up and speak to future generations. What I'm talking about is the mediocre books of this generation versus the mediocre books of my generation. This is where comes the great imbalance. The crap of today is truly crappier than the crap of my youth.

So, if a kid reads the best, they will have the same advantages as the kid who read the best of any successive, or probably future, generation. The problem with the top of the heap is that it is, always, a loosely populated area. Not too many books get to live in the poshest literary zip codes.

The ones who suffer are this generation's kiddie dorks, much like myself a few decades ago. We cannot live on a half dozen books a year. We might as well try to live on a few breaths a day.

Perhaps there is a place for the gritty realism found in much of contemporary mediocre fiction. The formula for today's mediocre books seems to be the poorest of the poor neighborhoods or the richest of the rich. I guess that's always true, a popular literary device for children, but the Deus ex Machina always present in the formulaic doesn't seem to work when the starting place is so dire or exclusive. There's a disconnect I'm still trying to piece through (so bear with me -- I concede I'm still trying to grasp it).

Let's take the ever popular arena of boarding school -- popular throughout time for it's reliance on the classic Home - Away - Home Again tool. By necessity, much of children's lit must take the child out of direct supervision of the adult world in order for him or her to come into their own. Becoming an adult most often occurs away from the eyes of actual adults.

The Boarding School (Mediocre) fiction of my youth may be seen in The Girls of Canby Hall series, while today's is in the Upper Class, It Girls, or Private series. In the eighties, the boarding school device was solely to separate children from their parents (how do we relate to each other when there is no adult to set the rules? How do we make decisions that are good when we won't get busted for making bad ones? Do we do the thing that is right or the thing that is easy?). Today, the focus is on the financial meaning of boarding school (I am in boarding school which means I have money and power, and I don't have to be nice. Let's talk about how hard it is to be so rich.) Sure, in the 80' boarding school addressed the issue of money -- we met the scholarship girl, and we learned that good people like people for who they are rather than what they have. Then we moved on to the next installment which might feature a girl who parties too hard who either learns her lesson or suffers. Then, we moved on to something else. The issues of money, drugs, and sex are the ONLY things boarding school books today focus on. Over and over with the same issues interspersed with shopping trips and girl-on-girl backstabbing.

I'm not saying there weren't problems with Canby Hall and other series of my youth. Mediocre books of my youth were always overly moralistic, for one thing. Good girls didn't have sex because sex always had negative consequences (one of the reasons girls of my generation passed around copies of Forever until the damn glue came off the binding). Good girls never drank or they would automatically be shunned for their destructive behavior. They were also a little bit too Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at times -- once the three girls became friends at Canby Hall, they never had to question each other. Best friendship was a vow that equalled the call of the convent. We all knew that smelled a bit like old fish.

That said, the pendulum has swung WAY too far in the other direction. In today's boarding school books, your best friend is, dollars to doughnuts, going to be your worst enemy at least once before it's through. Best friendship vows are now ALWAYS trumped by a cute boy. The lessons of feminism have, to say the least been taken out to the woodchipper never to be heard from again.

In Canby Hall and others of that ilk, the bitch got hers, and you cheered when she did. By the end of the book, you could rest assured that karma would out. Then, you lay back on your Strawberry Shortcake sheets, grabbed your Cabbage Patch Doll, and tried to figure out how you could be the nicest person you could be because SHE was the one good things happened to.

Today, the winner is simply the one who gets the stud. You COULD try to be the nicest girl in the bunch, but the more efficient route is just to go to the gym and beauty parlor. You know, and then put out.

I just finished the memoir Restless Virgins about the oral sex scandal at Milton Academy in 2005. It reads kind of the same. I don't think that's a coincidence. I haven't read nearly enough to determine whether it correlation or causality, but I know, for darn sure, it isn't happenstance.

So, our books were mediocre, and today's books are mediocre, which leaves us to ask which kind of crap is preferable. I gotta hang on to the well-aged crap. Maybe it sent me out into the real world with an overly sunny view of what I was going to encounter, but it didn't turn me into the kind of girl, like those of Milton Academy 2005, who believed that bad behavior towards your best friend was just the way things were, and that giving 5 boys blowjobs at the same time was just their due, "part of the social contract" (the authors' words, and they went to Milton).

I could care less about the behavior of the girl at Milton Academy. If you want to give 5 blowjobs to 5 guys, more power to you, but the culture that says boys determine your place in the social soup line is ludicrous. I may have had to learn the painful lesson that no boy on the planet was going to be as sweet and perfect as the boys in my books, but no one ever had to sit me down and tell me that boys didn't necessarily deserve to get whatever they wanted from me simply because they had a penis, and the penis ruled the world.

Know what? Boys in the books of my adulthood are still better than the boys I know in real life (yes, even the Crimefighter, sad to say, although he's closer than most). That's why I read! If I wanted a thoroughly normal type of good boy, I'd hang out with one of my many really awesome male friends or spend time cuddled up to the Crimefighter. When I want more than that (and more than I could ever expect) I open up my books and meet once again Roarke or Daemon or Heathcliff on the moors. I don't expect real men to be the men in novels, as they are the epitome of what could be. Experience shows us what is possible and what is fiction, but starting high and always keeping an eye on that ideal means somewhere in our heads, we always know we DESERVE the ideal, and settle for the close.

That's not available if your formative romantic heroes are those found in today's teen mediocre boarding school literature. There seems to be a desensitivity to what girls deserve. If the prevailing ideology they learn is not to aim for the stars (yes, only to be crushed when they realize no man is Rochester, even Rochester himself) but simply to embrace the popular, what can they hope to wind up with?

The unavailable types of boys of my teenage books grew up to be the unavailable types of men in my adult books. THAT is why the juvenile lit of my youth, even the stuff that was just average, treated me more like an adult than the average young adult novels of today.

There will be more later, I'm sure, but right now there seems to be a ruckus downstairs...... so I bid ado to Mr. Darcy and go see what the hell has the Crimefighter using bowling words in the house......