CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The July/August 2008 Horn Book magazine has been published and some of the articles are already available online. The profiles of Newbery and  Caldecott awards winners Brian Selznick and Laura Amy Schlitz will interest Australian readers.

Remember Zoe? The young girl who dreams of playing piano at the Sydney Opera House. Or Carnegie Hall, depending on which continent you read the book.

Author of Kind of Perfect, Linda Urban, has responded quickly to our enquiry and has generously given permission to be quoted:

I’m not exactly sure why ABC thought that my book would be less appealing to Australian kids if it retained its original American setting — but they did and my US publisher encouraged me to trust that they know the market.  After reading their suggested changes, I felt that the essential story remained the same and other than swapping Michigan for New South Wales and changing biscuit for cookie, there really weren’t many differences.

What was important to me was that Zoe’s story — her real dreams, desires, emotions, frustrations — stay true and I think that the ABC editors were able to accomplish this.  If changing the locale and a few details meant that the story would be more accessible for readers, then I was fine with that.

I certainly didn’t give any thought to the notion that this might be misleading.  I’m not exactly sure how the book is otherwise being marketed, so perhaps you are aware of something in the positioning of the title in shops that I am not?

Please thank your reviewer for recommending my book.  I’d love to see the review if ever it is made public.

Another long email to Linda followed - saying in part:

You are right. Zoe’s story does hold true, and this is precisely why there was no need for the ABC to change anything. Kids will identify with her whether she lives in Detroit, Sydney of Timbuktu. I think the ABC has underestimated their intelligence big time! We are always amazed that Australian titles have changes made when they get to the States. Readers are perfectly capable of making linguistic leaps and as I say, this is the first example I have encountered here. Not keen for it to become a trend!

We also commented that:

It seems … utterly patronising to readers [for publishers] to do this … Australian kids are so used to reading books in other settings that a book will always stand on its own merits as originally written. Kids learn so much incidentally when reading books that have settings other than their own. They need a variety of voices and experiences and there are plenty of Australian writers to tell Australian stories.

Linda agrees and says she will be thinking ‘longer and harder’ should she be lucky enough to have her next novel published here as well. And let’s hope she does, for her voice is fresh and funny.

Oh dear. After our puzzled query about possible trends in global publishing (see Zoe’s remarkable international adaptability in Kind of Perfect) comes this report from the Guardian. A taste …

Last year, Tom Becker won the Waterstone’s prize for children’s fiction with his first novel, Darkside; last week he won another award, the Calderdale children’s book prize. The talk among agents and publishers has been about his suspenseful prose, his great potential. But few people have been talking about a more salient fact: that the book’s concept and story was generated not by Becker, but by focus groups.

Focus groups?

Emma John poses the question: Focus groups are muscling their way into the arts. Are they a useful tool - or a death blow to creativity?

Implications? Thoughts? Comments? And is this happening here in Australia? We’d love some discussion.

We have just received a warm review for a new title, Kind of Perfect, by Linda Urban. The review will appear in the next edition of Fiction Focus, which should be in schools at the end of the month.  The reviewer really enjoyed the title and warmed to the young protagonist, Zoe, who dreams of playing piano at the Sydney Opera House one day.  So far, so good.

Published in Sydney by ABC Books and with several other Australian allusions, such as NRMA,  scattered throughout the text you would be forgiven for thinking that this is an Australian book.

But look more closely. The only hint that all is not as it seems are are the words on the verso of the title page :

‘A Crooked Kind of Perfect’ by Linda Urban. Copyright (c) 2007. Published by arrangement with Harcourt, Inc.

Not ‘First published as ‘A Crooked Kind of Perfect’ because, well, it wasn’t technically the same book. In the US edition, Zoe yearns to play at Carnegie Hall and the setting is distinctly American. But nowhere in this Australian edition is this clear. Is this just clever marketing, or is it actually misleading to readers?

BTW, the local cover isn’t a patch on the original, so why have they bothered?

And it begs the question: Do readers in the UK have Zoe playing at the Royal Festival Hall? If we were cynical, we’d start to think that this might be the beginning of a globalisation trend, with copy editors trawling pages of texts published in one country to change all original references to local ones. Surely not.

We have written to Linda Urban for her thoughts. We’ll keep you posted.

There’s a great post today on Guys Lit Wire, a blog about books for boys. Do teenage boys need books with weak female characters? links to a YouTube discussion where two older males bemoan that boys can’t be heroes any more. In praising a new title, Nick of Time by Ted Bell, the speakers make a point of saying how great it is that the female characters are passive so that the boys can rescue them.

This discussion is rebutted confidently by ‘Colleen’:

‘There are a couple of things that bother me about this discussion (between two adult men without a teenager in sight by the way). First it is that for a boy to feel heroic he must rescue a girl - and the girl also needs to be rescued. I’m sure the sociologists would have a field day over all this but I can’t believe that anyone in the 21st century would believe that such antiquated notions of what it means to be a hero have any place in a worthwhile discussion. Save the world - yes! Save the animals, save the environment, save whatever needs saving in your books. But the girl MUST be saved by the boy for the boy to feel powerful? How do these gentlemen think it makes the girl feel to have to wait to be saved? Have they ever thought about that at all?’

Colleen also provides a ‘top of the head’ list of titles where boys are both strong and heroic.

It’s a terrific discussion for a boys’ lit blog, with plenty of comments coming in.

If you have read Janet Tashjian’s 2004 title The Gospel According to Larry, you’d be aware of Larry’s zeal to reduce the clutter in our lives by owning just 75 items at any one time. His blog develops a cult following.

So it is with considerable interest that we note this recent article in Time.

The right book for the right reader at the right time - that is a given in the world of children’s literature. But what if the book cover says you are too young / too old to read it? This is a controversy just starting to hit its straps in the UK with publishers there intending to put age guidelines on the covers of children’s / YA books.

More than eighty authors, including Philip Pullman, are fighting back with a letter to be published in Bookseller magazine later this week. Not all authors are against the idea, however. Meg Rosoff says that it could be ‘extremely helpful for parents.’

Read the Guardian report here.

An interesting debate has been occurring on the Read Roger blog, the Horn Book editor’s ‘rants and raves’ as he puts it.

The Horn Book Journal has for a long time listed C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia not in the order they were published but in reading order, thus putting The Magician’s Nephew at the head of the list. Many other sources do the same.

But protests from readers have forced a change - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) now leads the charge, with The Magician’s Nephew (1955) sitting where it was published, between The Horse and His Boy (1954) and The Last Battle (1956).

The comments that have led to the change in Horn Book’s policy make interesting reading.

With Prince Caspian about to hit cinema sceens, some readers will be finding this series for the first time. But in what order?

Gen X and Gen Y we know about, but a long article in Newsweek magazine this week is talking about Gen R. And it’s good news for readers.

Generation R (R is for Reader) talks about the boom in YA publishing, and how it’s not all about Harry Potter. David Levithan is quoted as saying we are in a ’second golden age’ for young adult books - ‘the most exciting time for young-adult literature since the late 1960s and 1970s when ‘The Chocolate War’ [by Robert Cormier] and ‘Forever’ [by Judy Blume] were published.’

We knew that, but it’s great that Newsweek is spreading the word.

You’ve got to like what they are doing with promoting children’s literature in the UK. Not only do they have a Children’s Laureate, a national centre for children’s books and have declared 2008 the National Year of Reading, there is now talk of a prestigious national award for children’s literature.

Already dubbed ‘the children’s Booker’, the award is intended to compensate for the demise of the Nestle Awards. It was announced earlier this year that these awards, some of Britain’s longest-running, would be discontinued and the focus placed on the book giving schemes Bookstart and Booked Up. Wendy Cooling gave us an overview of the success of the Bookstart programme at the recent CBCA conference.

In Australia we have the national CBCA Book of the Year Awards, and various Premier’s Awards in some of the states, but just imagine the prestige of a Miles Franklin Award for children’s literature. Oh, and a Children’s Laureate would be rather nice, too.

Some copycat ideas are worth pursuing.