Suitable for Children, Written for Children and About Children -- are they the same thing?

[rj_anderson]

Okay, so this is what I was going to say in the other post I wrote out all nicely on my laptop and hadn't transferred over yet, but since snickelish asked about it I decided, heck with it, I'm just going to ramble and not try to write some big fancy essay-type thing

Comments

[rj_anderson]

Eustace/Jill OTP, is all I can say. :)

[friede]

You know, this ties in quite closely to my current work about identification. Right now I'm writing about the difference between two novels by Sarah Fielding -- one, considered the "first novel for children" and the others "for adults".

[persephone_kore]

Personally, I remember reaching the end of Anne of Green Gables and feeling disappointed that Anne was getting too grown up, and not wanting to read the sequels. I think I was eleven.

But at the same time, I would pretty regularly read stories about characters who were adults, so it's not like this was a uniform complaint. I think I just wanted more of Anne-as-she-was.

[rj_anderson]

That's because grown-up Anne was boring, IMO. She lost all her spunk and inventiveness and became Predictable.

[persephone_kore]

I hadn't read any of the other books at the time, so unless you mean she was getting boring toward the end of the very first book, I'm not sure that's quite it.... I think I felt disappointed and possibly betrayed that she appeared to be developing a romantic interest. Again, I didn't mind this in various other books. Maybe it was that in some ways I was expecting Anne to be (and stay) more like me. (It didn't bother me when, say, Amy in Little Women got toward growing up, but then, I didn't like or identify with her much when she was a kid. :P)

I enjoyed some of the grown-up Anne books when I did read them, but it was a few years later before I got around to circling back. There was one of them I remember being in hysterics over--I forget which, but I think it was the one where she wrote a lot of letters.

[rj_anderson]

Well, and to be fair, it's true that not all 8-12 year old girls are going to be interested in a romantic slant to their reading -- but then not every book is to the taste of every reader, regardless of age.

[deenaml]

I would love to find a blog/interview/etc somewhere where a marketing person from a pub co for kidlit was available to answer questions like this! Anyone have a connection?

[robinellen]

I was like you. When I read mg books, I definitely thought ahead in their lives and added some romance. I have a ms out there which is about the summer after high school, and I've had an agent ask me to make her younger -- which, so far, I've refused to do as it would ruin the story. But her reasoning was that editors don't like stories about girls outside high school. Okaayyy...yet this book has been requested by three editors.

I think some people like to make rules because the books they like (or buy or rep) all fit in those boxes...and the rest of us are expected to follow them (which I won't...at least not until I *have* to).