Three Ways of Looking at Court of Fives
The review is over here.
I realized some time ago that the young me would have loved books like Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls spy school stories, whereas the old me barely got through the first book, wincing at all the elementary errors these supposedly teenage super-spies made every single time they exited their boarding school. Boarding school and spies would have been enough for me!
There are a lot of kids' books like that--perfect for their audience. Some I read anyway because other elements pull me in, and some I had to bash my way through for jury reading. If I review them, I try to review them from my kid self, and say so.
Then there are the ones that I don't think kids would like at all, that are for whatever reason published as YA but I suspect the true audience is adult. And when I look into it, in my experience, few teens get past the first page. This happened with Margo Lanaghan's work. I've talked about this on YA panels over the years, and have had people point out examples of teens who read Margo's work, but I never found any, nor did I see much praise where teens did talk about her work; the one highly praised story "The Day they Sang My Sister Down" got what I can only describe as sick fascination, but the later novel was a total overwhelm, and not in a good way. But adults who like really depressing books, especially about rape, waxed enthusiastic.
I wondered then, and do now, that if some books are really written for adults (college age readers being adults, though since Harry Potter's generation we seem to be calling them New Adults for marketing purposes), but publishers decide to push them into YA. More sales? This is depressing enough to win awards? Example, Karen Hesse's exquisitely written but subtle, and profoundly depressing, Out of the Dust. It came out in the late nineties, and won the Newbery, so I had it on my school shelves for ten years.
In that time, not one of my students ever made it all the way through. When the Scholastic Fair came through each year, several times over those years I saw sixth grade girls whispering and warning other kids off it. I kept hoping that someone in the publishing world would smarten up and reissue it as an adult book because I thought it would make a terrific college text, bringing the horrors of the Dust Bowl to life.
But that experience was too overwhelming for a kid: which of the Bible prophets said that divine revelation only gives out what humans are able to comprehend? Some stuff (I think) is too far beyond most kids' experience. We all know the kids who will read anything. Most of us were those kids. But for the rest, in various discussions defending overwhelming reads, reasoning tends to start with "Well kids should . . ." which leads off in several different problematical directions.
Anyway, when I hit a YA that gives me pleasure as an adult and also pleases the kid me still inside, I get an extra kick of whee. This was one of those books.
I realized some time ago that the young me would have loved books like Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls spy school stories, whereas the old me barely got through the first book, wincing at all the elementary errors these supposedly teenage super-spies made every single time they exited their boarding school. Boarding school and spies would have been enough for me!
There are a lot of kids' books like that--perfect for their audience. Some I read anyway because other elements pull me in, and some I had to bash my way through for jury reading. If I review them, I try to review them from my kid self, and say so.
Then there are the ones that I don't think kids would like at all, that are for whatever reason published as YA but I suspect the true audience is adult. And when I look into it, in my experience, few teens get past the first page. This happened with Margo Lanaghan's work. I've talked about this on YA panels over the years, and have had people point out examples of teens who read Margo's work, but I never found any, nor did I see much praise where teens did talk about her work; the one highly praised story "The Day they Sang My Sister Down" got what I can only describe as sick fascination, but the later novel was a total overwhelm, and not in a good way. But adults who like really depressing books, especially about rape, waxed enthusiastic.
I wondered then, and do now, that if some books are really written for adults (college age readers being adults, though since Harry Potter's generation we seem to be calling them New Adults for marketing purposes), but publishers decide to push them into YA. More sales? This is depressing enough to win awards? Example, Karen Hesse's exquisitely written but subtle, and profoundly depressing, Out of the Dust. It came out in the late nineties, and won the Newbery, so I had it on my school shelves for ten years.
In that time, not one of my students ever made it all the way through. When the Scholastic Fair came through each year, several times over those years I saw sixth grade girls whispering and warning other kids off it. I kept hoping that someone in the publishing world would smarten up and reissue it as an adult book because I thought it would make a terrific college text, bringing the horrors of the Dust Bowl to life.
But that experience was too overwhelming for a kid: which of the Bible prophets said that divine revelation only gives out what humans are able to comprehend? Some stuff (I think) is too far beyond most kids' experience. We all know the kids who will read anything. Most of us were those kids. But for the rest, in various discussions defending overwhelming reads, reasoning tends to start with "Well kids should . . ." which leads off in several different problematical directions.
Anyway, when I hit a YA that gives me pleasure as an adult and also pleases the kid me still inside, I get an extra kick of whee. This was one of those books.