Yesterday was my day to post, but I missed it because I had a bad day and just couldn't bring myself to post. So I am making up for it today. I hope you don't mind. (My bad day consisted of learning that come August 1, 2010 I will be officially unemployed.....if anyone knows of a librarian or museum job in the DC area please let me know!)
A friend of mine recently asked me to compose a reading list for his 10-year-old sister. A task I have been happily applying myself to perhaps a little too vigorously since I'm annotating the list and providing ISBN numbers and prices. Overkill? Perhaps, but since he probably hasn't read a lot of these books I thought he might like to know what they are actually about instead of buying based on title.
I was trying to find recently published books that were like the great books from my childhood. The only problem I'm finding is that almost everything published today is some sort of fantasy novel. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy. You can read anyone of my books and see that, but I like to think that I and writers of my day did fantasy a little differently than it is done now.
Harry Potter obviously caused this craze although there were magic books before its existence. Just like Twilight helped fuel the paranormal craze. But if you look at books like The Railway Children and The Secret Garden you will see a different kind of fantasy. A fantasy that Disney can't really build a theme park for. It's the fantasy of a child's imagination. And that has no limits and no bounds.
What draws me most to The Railway Children and to The Secret Garden is the children's imagination. They think things and then they become magical. Not because they really are magical but because they have a secret special meaning for the children involved. I was trying to explain this to my uncle once. The reason why I find Victorian children's literature fascinating and as I was describing it he said "Honey, the reason you love that so much is because that's what you were like when you were a child. You imagined all sorts of secret worlds." And he's right. I remember playing this one game with my little brother and his best friend where my little brother was a whale and his best friend and I researchers on a boat that could talk to the whale. It was our own thing. Our own magic world where we could talk to animals.
I feel that some of that is missing from today's children's literature. It's based so much on creating a world that's so unlike our world that we're missing and our children are missing the magic in everyday things. How just a small change like talking to animals can make such a big difference. We don't need entire worlds where everything is magical. We just need a little change in our everyday lives. It not only helps us appreciate what we have, but makes us a little magical just by using our imaginations.
So if anyone has any great books they think a 10-year-old should read please list them below. Or let me know what you think of the fantasy craze in literature today.
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It's too old for a ten-year-old, but, have you ever read "The Secret Country" trilogy by Pamela Dean? It's about a group of cousins who spend their summers together where they have built an imaginary world in their heads. One summer they are separated, but both groups find their way into the Secret County and have to live our their imagined fantasy (even when there are bits of it that they really want to prevent).
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