conuly | I'm begging all of you:

If you have children, or teach children, or otherwise are in any way going to be called upon to recommend/supply books to children read some children's books that were published in this century.

And then, when you're stocking your home or classroom library, or suggesting a long list of books for a friend's child, look at what you've picked out and ask yourself: is this a long list of wall-to-wall white people*? are they all straight, NT, nondisabled, middle class, nominally Christian? is it just chock-full of the 'isms? is this really a complete list?

I swear, sometimes I feel like I'm banging my head against a freaking wall. If the only books you're suggesting are the ones your beloved auntie put in your hands when you were small, the same ones she inherited from her favorite teacher, please. For the love of everything. Read something new.

Also - if you feel you need to warn that a rec has "some sexual content" or "some violence", but don't feel the need to warn that it's brimful of bigotry, maybe ask yourself why that is. (Or, flip it - if you're asking people to warn you for two of those things but not the third, again, why is that? When did you decide it was okay for your kid to read Ma Ingalls saying, without an ounce of narrative criticism, that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but it's not okay to read about the ghost of somebody's lynched father showing up to wake her and alert her to the need to flee?)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilysea

100% agree!

There are so many excellent children's books these days with excellent stories AND one or more of:

- characters of colour

- female protagonists

- LGBT protagonists

- families with two mums or two dads

- characters who are religions-other-than-Christian

- characters who are migrants

- characters who are First Nations

- characters who are working class or poverty class (for example It's a No-Money Day by Kate Milner is a book about a child visiting a foodbank with her mum that treats both the child and the mum as people worthy of respect and not as Othered/objects of pity - the reader is invited to like and to empathise and identify with the child who is the viewpoint character)

- boys who like traditionally "girl" things

- girls who like traditionally "boy" things

- books about kids who are trans

From:

the_future_modernes

YES!

From:

conuly

Also, let's be blunt: the average children's book written today is still better written than most of the "classic" books from yore.

I know a lot of people who have a weirdo idea that it's the opposite, that books in the past have a higher quality of writing, and they're just straight wrong. And that's even before you account for the filtering effect, ie, only the best books are even remembered a generation later!

From:

lilysea

Yeah, if you asked me to recc older children's books that are still good

I'd recc the Pippi Longstocking books (but NOT the one set on an tropical island, that one has serious racism problems)

the Moomin books (which don't have any problems that I'm aware of - it probably doesn't hurt that the author was a female artist, a member of the art avant-garde world, and either lesbian or bisexual)

and some of the feminist fairytale retellings books from the 1970s (there are so many of these, and many of them are VERY GOOD).

Oh, and some Maurice Sendak books,

the Phantom Tollbooth,

and Edward Gorey.

From:

conuly

I have a longer list.

Though I think I know what the problem is with those folks, and Pippi is actually a great example.

When they think of high quality literature, they often tend to cite more complex sentence structures and occasionally more low-frequency vocabulary. Now, I wouldn't really call that "better" or "worse", just a different style, but they do.

However, where they go wrong is they confuse complex sentences for complex writing. And guess what? Older books, especially older children's books, do not often have more complex writing! They are significantly more likely than modern books to have each chapter make up a single, more-or-less self-contained story, with few or no arcs that the reader has to keep track of through the entire book. Each story is likely to have exactly zero subplots. There often isn't much need to consider multiple viewpoints.

There certainly are exceptions, there always are - but those are mostly suitable for older children or even adolescents.

So look at Pippi. I love her, but she's just what I'm talking about. Every story sits by itself. The children don't really change over the course of the books. Pippi is always interesting and funny and in the right - no doubts there! Which is great, but no matter how fancy the sentence structure of the translation it doesn't really make for a complex and varied story.

From:

thekumquat

My experience is that language change over generations results in kids needing to be a couple years older than their parents were, to understand the same story.

Taking Enid Blyton (basically the main storyteller in the UK in my youth), and finding the ones which weren't too stereotyped or had been 'updated', the biggest issue was sentences involving "I shall" and "shan't", words that have practically vanished (conversely, 'immediately' didn't seem to be in Blyton's vocabulary. Add all the cultural assumptions of After the War no longer being part of popular culture, and her books (some, at least) are now aimed at children 3-5 years older than the original readers.

Some stories hold up for an older audience; others... don't.

Some stories are worth a remake - Four Children and It, for example.

From:

conuly

Nesbit had her blind spots, but she remains one of the best children's authors of all time.

From:

james

Oh my god I had to sit here and ask myself "which century does she mean, the 20th or the 21st?" and I am just old, I am lost, time has no meaning, what the fuck even.

I had to read for context to figure out you meant the most recent century, not "the century my personal brain is stuck in."

From:

conuly

LOL, no, I get it!

I actually more usually phrase this as "a book no more than X years older than the child", but I decided to be generous this time around!

From:

james

My problem is that I work with several people whose parents are my age. And those co-workers are actual-factual adults. Not 20 year olds faking it, but actual real adults.

So I am used to trying to translate what I hear into "am I talking to someone my age, or a literal child who was not even born when I was protesting Reagan's first presidency run?"

From:

lilysea

Also, there are beloved children's books that have been RETOLD in a modern way,

for example Anne of Green Gables is now available as Anne of West Philly by Ivy N Weir, in which Anne is a Black kid in the foster system in suburbia.

https://www.bookdepository.com/Anne-West-Philly-Ivy-N-Weir/9780316459778

Little women is now available as Jo: An Adaptation of Little Women (Sort Of)

https://www.bookdepository.com/Jo-Adaptation-Little-Women-Sort-Kathleen-Gros/9780062875969

From:

conuly

for example Anne of Green Gables is now available as Anne of West Philly by Ivy N Weir, in which Anne is a Black kid in the foster system in suburbia.

Also Ana of California, as well as another half-a-dozen retellings in the past two decades.

Little women is now available as Jo: An Adaptation of Little Women (Sort Of)

This one also have a shitton of new diverse adaptations, though the only one I've read (never having read the original) notably doesn't kill off Beth. She gets very seriously ill, but clearly one of the motivations for rewriting the book was straight up fix-it fic. And I get that.

From:

the_future_modernes

YES TOO!

From:

shewhostaples

Jacqueline Wilson did a What Katy Did retelling a few years ago, too. I don't know if it's any good.

From:

cesy

I liked it.

From:

profiterole_reads

Anne of Green Gables also has at least 3 sapphic retellings. I think they're all YA, but some might be readable by younger kids.

From:

lilysea

it's not okay to read about the ghost of somebody's lynched father showing up to wake her and alert her to the need to flee?

which book is this from?

From:

conuly

Ophie's Ghosts.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/justina-ireland/ophies-ghosts/

Though it's by far not the most violent 1920s middle grade book with a black protagonist I've ever read, it's the first one that sprang to mind.

From:

lilysea

Thanks for the link!

I've just finished buying it as an ebook and reading it, I was a big fan of Justina Ireland's books Dread Nation and Deathless Divide

From:

lilysea

It amuses me how *extremely* familiar I am with the latest children's books and YA books given that I have no children and never plan on having children, and that I don't have nephews/nieces and I don't have an auntie role with any of my friends kids either.

But I follow a lot of authors and graphic novel artists/illustrators on social media, and I read a lot of children's books and YA, because they are good when I'm tired and they are less likely to be grimdark/everything is doomed forever than stuff aimed at adults.

From:

conuly

Also, less sex. I'm not opposed to sex in fiction, per se, but sometimes I just don't want to flipping read it. With middle grade, often I can even avoid gratuitous romance.

From:

lilysea

Sex/romance doesn't bother me,

but one of the nice things that I like about children's books/YA is there's much less chance of there being sexual assault/rape in the book

than there is in books marketed at adults.

From:

crystalpyramid

God yes.

I was recently bewildered when someone asked for recs for queer SF/F for a 13 year old and everyone was suggesting Valdemar and Pern. Which is how our generation got its queer SF/F but also things have improved so much since then!

From:

conuly

It's so annoying.

From:

alexseanchai

people might also reread what they intend to rec before they rec it, like, until I rewatched Disney's Aristocats the other month I'd entirely forgotten about the racist parts of "Everybody Wants To Be A Cat", and the rest of that song is probably the most famous part of the movie

From:

shewhostaples

Although I would not recommend the slew of offensive ghostwritten dreck with celebrities' names on the front (David Walliams, I'm looking at you) which is currently a feature of the UK kidlit market.

(Nothing against ghostwriting per se, but there are so many decent children's writers out there who are struggling for recognition, and indeed to pay the bills.)

From:

silveradept

It takes effort to do all of those things, though, and it's just easier to recommend the same material that was enjoyable when I was young. The racism and bigotry didn't affect me, paragon of equality and colorblindness that I am, so it won't affect them, either, no matter how many times the white classmates have a gleeful look in their eyes as they read "n-----" aloud over and over again and know that if someone complains, it'll be dismissed because "classic literature."

Feh. I get complaints about featuring books with dark-skinned people and topics line activism because some people believe it's "using children as political props" rather than focusing on their apolitical topics exclusively. And I'd wager a lot of the people who recommend all-white lists and the like don't know how much publishing is biased toward whiteness, straightness, and the like already.

From:

larryhammer

Sing it, Sister. Sing it loud.

From:

duskpeterson

It's possible to read both?

I mean, I read older novels when I was a kid. I won't say they never did me any harm, but they were balanced out by the new novels I was reading. And the new novels were balanced out by the older novels, which contained ideas that had fallen out of fashion, not always for good reasons.

I'm a big believer that we need both old and new in our lives.

From:

conuly

I never said otherwise.

But you've clearly never been on a thread where somebody asks for book recs and none of the books mentioned were published in the past 30 years.

From:

duskpeterson

I can see that would be discouraging, though I'd sort of expect it, given how few adults continue reading kids' books after they become adults. When the same lack of updatedness occurs when someone requests recs of adult books - that's when I begin to worry.

I've been going back to find the diverse books of my childhood (1981 and earlier). Some of them I already knew about; I searched out as many books on disabled people as I could when I was a kid. And some of them were hidden in plain view; it wasn't till I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff was disabled herself that I began to notice how many disabled characters she dropped into her books. It's starting to become a game for me: Spot the marginalized characters in the old children's books. A lot of their invisibility has to do with marketing, which is still a factor, but less than it used to be. For example, David Rees's In the Tent (1979) is a gay YA novel (and written by a gay author) . . . but darned if I could have told that from the original cover. My eye just passed over the novel when I encountered it in the children's department as a teen. I only realized - belatedly - that I should read it because I was digging into books about children's literature.