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“I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’”~ Maurice Sendak
“Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.” ~ E.B. White
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading children’s books. I discovered Rebecca Stead and Clare Vanderpool a couple of years ago. Stead is author of the 2010 Newbery Medal–winner When You Reach Me and Vanderpool, of the 2011 winner Moon over Manifest . I reread these and my mother and I read Stead’s Liar and Spy out to one another. We’re currently making our way through Vanderpool’s Navigating Early . Rebecca Stead’s latest, Goodbye Stranger , is lying in my bookshelf and we’ll get around to it before the winter break is up, hopefully.
By children’s books I don’t mean picture books for four- or five-year-olds (although those can be just as stunning and thought-provoking, if not more). I’m talking about books written for the middle-grade readers — the age-group of somewhere between ten and fourteen. The protagonists of the books I’ve been reading are all about twelve, and the plotlines deal with adventure and suspense. The characters find themselves in unfamiliar, sometimes dangerous situations or surroundings and, with the help of a friend or two, attempt to solve the puzzle at the heart of the narrative. On the surface of it, these are textbook middle-school novels.
But there’s more to these books than meets the eye. There’s something unmistakably dark about each of these stories, something deeply sorrowful about the lives they describe, and a strange grownup-ness to their child protagonists. In Navigating Early , twelve-year-old Early Auden is convinced that his brother who died in the war is still alive, and the first-person narrator Jackie is living with a vague sense of guilt over his mother’s death and anxiety about why his father has left him alone at boarding school.
In Liar and Spy , Georges is trying to find things to do that will dull the pain of being bullied at school and help him pretend that a recent tragedy at home hasn't shaken him to his very roots. When he befriends Safer, his upstairs neighbour, he only encounters in him a version of himself — a child with a tendency to worry too much but sweep all his secret pains under the carpet.
The conventional adventure/mystery plot is supposed to be fun. But it’s suffering that’s at the forefront in these stories — the suffering of lonely children, the suffering of floundering but well-intentioned adults, and the way in which the two feed off each other.
It’s important to establish the complexity of the relationship between the child and adult spheres as seen in these books. Adults do a great deal more than make rules and express approval and disapproval; in turn, the children respond to adults emotionally — we aren't given protagonists who sneak around out of some rebellious instinct or operate in a children’s realm so distinct that it opposes itself to adult society — with some understanding of the vulnerability and confusion that characterises the lives of even the most steadfast carer figures in their lives.
In Moon over Manifest , for instance, key segments of the narrative describe the lives of the adult residents of the town of Manifest. Vanderpool’s protagonist Abilene needs to hear their stories in order to understand why she belongs in that slightly muddled, dusty town of second- and third-generation immigrants as well as to decipher the guilt and pain that her own father has carried with him ever since he left there as a child. Moon over Manifest is telling us that everyone has a past, that childhood is the history of adulthood, and adulthood the thread that follows from childhood. It’s a big idea for a children’s novel to broach. But it’s an attempt to frame the adult and child worlds in a relationship of empathy towards one another, to suggest that each universe expand to accommodate the stories of the other.
But what does a child do when presented with an adult’s story? How do Stead’s and Vanderpool’s young heroes and heroines process the adult world? It’s actually uncanny how similarly the two writers express the angst of children faced with the realities of grown-up living. Both treat fantasy as a storytelling aesthetic, but also as a child’s internal coping mechanism. Fantasy is the format the world falls into when the child mind bites off more than it can chew. Fantasy provides palatable explanations for sorrow, sustains hope where the adult world contains none. Both in Navigating Early and Liar and Spy children construct powerful, elaborate fantasies in order to avoid encountering the circumstances the adult world so baldly presents them with.
Questions of death, illness, mortality, everyday sustenance lie exposed and in waiting for the child to stumble into but the child takes a different route, finds new ways of seeing the day, formulates new ways to keep themselves occupied — by chasing mystery men, tracking black bears, watching nesting parrots from behind an apartment window, walking out of classrooms when teachers say something that hits too close home and send tremors through the foundation of a precious fantasy.
The children in these books are extraordinary. The frank lyrical language that Stead and Vanderpool make their protagonists think and speak in and the solid emotional certainty of these young minds are gorgeous, bewitching. For instance, Abilene of Moon over Manifest makes the following observation: “Maybe the world wasn't made up of universals that could be summed up in neat little packages. Maybe there were just people. People who were tired and hurt and lonely and kind in their own way and in their own time.”
Why was it that as an eighteen-year-old it was perfectly acceptable to me to read about older people — thirty- or forty- or fifty-year-olds — grappling with the dilemmas of their existence, but that it was somehow ludicrous to bother with the now past miniature universe of childhood?
Marcus and Miranda in When You Reach Me talk about common sense as a “habit of thought”, a “name for the way we’re used to thinking”. In Navigating Early Jackie sees a photo of his school’s star athlete in a trophy case and thinks the boy looks like “he held life in that championship cup and he could drink from it whenever he liked”, but knows from his own experience of loss that “life can’t be held in a cup, and nothing lasts forever”.
The first-person narrative voices are strong, distinctive. They show preoccupation with the self, a fear of rejection, loneliness, but also a deep-seated urge to look for answers in the sphere outside the mind, in the compassion of other people. It is exhilarating to read about insightful characters, to participate in this conceptualisation of the child mind, to believe, along with Stead and Vanderpool, that as harrowed as these children are by their especially unfortunate experiences, they have learnt, are learning, and are finding ways of meeting life with fortitude. But this is the point at which the worlds of these books fall apart for me. They’re beautiful, and startlingly unrealistic. They are masterful works of fiction.
After I finished school and a few months before college began, I worked briefly at a children's bookstore. It was only then that I began to see children’s literature as more than just the books that had kept me occupied in middle school before I got to sink my teeth into the ‘real’ stuff, fiction for grown-ups. It struck me then that this rite of passage attitude to reading made no sense, that there was no reason why an entire world of reading should become irrelevant to me just because I was no longer middle-reader age.
Why was it that as an eighteen-year-old it was perfectly acceptable to me to read about older people — thirty- or forty- or fifty-year-olds — grappling with the dilemmas of their existence, but that it was somehow ludicrous to bother with the now past miniature universe of childhood? And then slowly, making my way through the picture books and novels in the bookstore's shelves, I discovered that adult lit didn't have a monopoly on grit and trauma.
The subject matter of children’s books can be heavy, often downright grim. Protagonists tend to be misfits, or struggling with loss, or like Miranda in When You Reach Me , surrounded by loving people but too insecure and scared to be able to see it. Childhood is intense and puzzling, just like the rest of life, and this literature reflects that. A line from Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie , which I picked up off the shelf on a whim and finished in an afternoon, runs: “I believe, sometimes, that the whole world has an aching heart.”
There is beauty in the storytelling, richness in the ideas and images. It isn't a miniature universe at all.
