The Childrens Book Review » Teens: Young Adults

This information was gathered from the New York Times Best Sellers list, which reflects the sales of books from books sold nationwide, including independent and chain stores. It is correct at the time of publication and presented in random order. Visit: www.nytimes.com.

Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, 2012

Bianca Schulze — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:52:16 +0000

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: January 25, 2012

Winner

Honor Book

“The Michael L. Printz Award is an award for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature. It is named for a Topeka, Kansas school librarian who was a long-time active member of the Young Adult Library Services Association. The award is sponsored by Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association.” ~YALSA

Newbery Medal Winners, 2012

Bianca Schulze — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:46:09 +0000

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: January 23, 2012

Medal Winner

Honor Book

“The Newbery Medal was named for eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery. It is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” ~ALSC

Everneath by Brodi Ashton

Bianca Schulze — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:56:55 +0000

Reading level: Ages 14 and up

Add this book to your collection: Everneath

Have you read this book? Rate it:
[ratings]

Video courtesy of harperteen: “Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath. Now she’s returned—to her old life, her family, her boyfriend—before she’s banished back to the underworld . . . this time forever. She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her, six months for good-byes she can’t find the words for, six months to find redemption, if it exists.”

Maria Tatar on the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up

Bianca Schulze — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 07:54:32 +0000

By Nicki Richesin, The Children’s Book Review
Published: January 4, 2012

Maria Tatar

Maria Tatar is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. Her latest book The Annotated Peter Pan is a glorious celebration of the centenary of the first publication of the novel, originally entitled Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie. It features a splendid array of photographs and illustrations, many reproduced for the first time, including The Boy Castaways of Black Lane Island. The book also includes a compilation of responses from famed artists, including Barrie’s contemporaries such as as Virginia Woolf and Mark Twain, to his work. For more on Tatar’s discoveries and Barrie’s creation of Peter Pan, please read on.

Nicki Richesin: I read The Annotated Peter Pan with such gripping wonder. It’s a marvelous book; congratulations to you. The story of Peter Pan has fascinated readers for generations and even proved a vehicle for a variety of adaptations in film, books, plays, and musicals. After your extensive research on this subject, what do you believe J.M. Barrie would think of its enduring appeal? Why do you believe his story has held such fascination for its audience?

Maria Tatar: Peter Pan started out as a bedtime story and turned into a cultural myth. Barrie knew that he was onto something important, but I think even he would have been surprised that the story has endured as long as it has. There is more to Peter Pan than fairy dust and pirates. It’s a story about what it means to grow up—the gains and the losses that we incur when we become adults. Barrie felt the pain of the process more acutely than most of us do, and he also saw himself as something of a “betwixt and between”—no longer a child yet still not fully adult. It was more than just the “inner child.” He was able to go back in ways that few of us can, capturing the sense of adventure and eagerness for experience that is part of childhood desires.

In your “Introduction to J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan,” you write, “We owe it to our children to give them books that do not put a politically correct dot on every “i” and that offer challenges, provocations, and an occasional sting that keeps us alive and thinking about those who lived before us.” You believe this would lead children to learn to search and explore and has been confirmed in your exhaustive study of fairy tales and in your books such as Enchanted Hunters. Could you further explain what you mean by this notion?

MT: I think it was Philip Pullman who told us that “thou shalt not is soon forgotten” and that “once upon a time” lasts forever. Great writers are above all else storytellers—occasionally even magicians—who give us worlds created by words. Children quickly grow wise to the ways of fiction and know that there are no easy messages, morals, and lessons in the books they read. There is no direct path from what is in the book to “truth,” nor is there a hotline to the meaning of life. When they read fiction, children develop a sense of curiosity about the lives of others (where else can you read minds and learn about what other people really think?), and they use their explorations of fictional worlds, along with their real-life experiences and exchanges, to develop a moral compass.

Peter Pan was my favorite story as a child. I read the edition edited by Josette Frank, beautifully illustrated by Marjorie Torrey, and published by Random House in 1957. We also had an edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Which version of this story do you prefer and why?

MT: Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens are exquisite, and I can’t imagine any rivals to those images. But I also love Mabel Lucie Attwell’s illustrations, although they are for a younger crowd. I have grown to love F.D. Bedford’s illustrations for the first edition of Peter Pan. At first they seemed fussy and cluttered to me, but now they feel like windows into each of the chapters in which they appear. They have an astonishing depth and texture. I’m reminded of how much I disliked, as a child, John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now they seem to capture the essence of Carroll’s story, and I can’t imagine reading the book without them.

You draw an interesting comparison between J.M. Barrie’s relationship with Peter Llewelyn Davies (really all five of the boys) and Charles Dodgson’s with Alice Liddell. Both authors were inspired by their young friends to create Neverland and Wonderland, worlds in which civilized society did not exist and to which children might escape. The two authors were revered and yet rumors were spread by those who frowned on adult men befriending children. Why do you believe both authors were enthralled with these particular children and deeply influenced by their little muses?

Credit: Peter Pan, 1912 (bronze) by Sir George James Frampton (1860-1928) Kensington Gardens, London, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality / copyright status: English / out of copyright

MT: We live in a culture deeply suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in other people’s children. Both Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie had a deep attachment to children, and they understood, in unprecedented ways, that there is beauty, humor, and poetry in the imagination of children. They lived in an era that famously developed a cult of childhood, but it was a cult that valued the beauty of children rather than their playful spirit and imaginative energy. Children were to be seen and not heard. Both Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie listened to the voice of the child and produced works that were, in some sense, collaborations. And, perhaps not coincidentally, both photographed children and appreciated the beauty of children at rest and at play. There is not a shred of evidence that there was anything improper in Barrie’s relationship to children, and the five Llewelyn Davies boys he adopted were quite firm about the fact that Barrie was a completely generous, benevolent presence in their lives.

While you were studying Barrie’s letters at Beinecke Library at Yale University, you wrote that you became very emotional. Although your response was in large part due to reading more about the boys’ feelings after the untimely death of their beloved mother and father Arthur and Sylvia Davies, I suspect it was deeper than this and due to finally reading about the boy who wouldn’t grow up and lived a life removed from the world. You discovered that few people truly knew Barrie apart from his adopted sons and housekeeper. What did you think when you read Barrie’s note, “May God blast any one who writes a biography of me” in his notebooks?

MT: Barrie described himself once as a shuttered house. I may have read his letters, notebooks, and diaries, but he remains a mystery to me—in a good sense. There were times when I felt myself to be an intruder in the archives, although there are those who will argue that posthumous papers belong to posterity. Occasionally I came across documents that seemed almost sacred—George’s letters to Barrie, written from the Western Front, just a few days before his death, to cite just one example. There was so much joy in Barrie’s life, and so many triumphs, but there is no getting past the tragic deaths of Arthur and Sylvia Davies, or George’s death in World War I, or Michael’s suicide at Oxford. Barrie was so guarded and private in real life that I felt it doubly important to treat his life with respect.

On your blog Breezes from Wonderland, you track the media and film world’s attempts to reinvent classic and fairy tales in film, music, plays and television. Which recent productions do you believe have been most successful?

MT: I rarely meet a fairy-tale revival or reinvention that I don’t like. I am enthralled by Catherine Breillat’s fairy-tale films, but I also find the new crime series Grimm, as well as the series Once Upon a Time, entertaining. I’m eager to see the three new Snow White films coming out in 2012, and I’m astonished that Hollywood, which has always used fairy-tale narratives as subtexts—is now explicitly reinventing the old tales

A.S. Byatt has written introductions for a few of your books (The Grimm Reader and The Annotated Brothers Grimm) and reviews of your books for The Guardian. How did you first begin working together and do you have future projects planned?

MT: A.S. Byatt has been wonderfully generous in writing the introduction for the Grimm books. Her work is always inspiring, and I am hoping that I will one day have the chance to meet her in person. We correspond from time to time, and I’m hoping to recruit her as a contributor to a handbook on fairy tales that I am editing.

Who do you believe are the most exciting children’s book authors of today and which ones do you think will make the sort of impact that readers will remember and cherish into their adulthood?

MT: I taught the Harry Potter series for the first time this year and was deeply impressed, once again, by the final book in the series—I think I now finally understand horcruxes and hallows, as well as the depth of Rowling’s engagement with the great existential mysteries. The devotion of my students to that series is nothing short of astounding, and the books have an unparalleled bonding power. It took me a while to become an ardent fan, perhaps because the books become more sophisticated and adult-friendly over time. Harry Potter grows up, and so does the generation of children that began reading his story when they were his age. I’m also a fan of Neil Gaiman, Lois Lowry, and Brian Selznick. And The Hunger Games is impossible to put down, even if it’s not a book to “cherish.” Children’s literature seems no longer to be just for children, and, these days, we live in a world of shared electronic media that has knocked down some of the old barriers.

What sort of projects are you currently working on?

MT: I have just finished a Young Adult novel about a boy growing up in Nazi-occupied Greece. It’s my first work of fiction, and it was inspired by a real-life story of an old friend of mine who lived in Athens during the second World War. Then it’s back to fairy tales.

Nicki Richesin is the editor of four anthologies,What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To, and Letting Go of Their Daughters; Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond; Crush: 26 Real-Life Tales of First Love; and The May Queen: Women on Life, Work, and Pulling it all Together in your Thirties. Her anthologies have been excerpted and praised in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Redbook, Parenting, Cosmopolitan, Bust, Salon, Daily Candy, and Babble.

How Young is a Young Adult?

Bianca Schulze — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:28:42 +0000

Kids Reading YA Fiction

By Nancy Holder & Debbie Viguié (Authors, Unleashed), for The Children’s Book Review
Published: December 22, 2011

Nancy Holder

As writers who write both young adult and adult fiction (and in the case of Nancy, all the way down to middle grade and early readers as well), we are often asked to give an appropriate age range for potential child and teen readers (as well as Lexile ratings) for our various single titles and series books. It’s well known among young adult fiction authors that a large part of our readership is comprised of adults, and in fact, titles that were originally published as adult novels are being repackaged and marketed as young adult titles. (Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, for example, was originally sold as an adult novel, but that novel and its companion, Ender’s Shadow, prompted the bestowing of the 2008 Margaret A. Edwards by YALSA on Card.)[1]

Debbie Viguié

Taking this conversation in the other direction—how young?—can prove problematic. Some reviewers and teachers have opined that Harry Potter is not a children’s book series, due to subject nature (death) and complexity of language and theme[2]. Within the same community, there has been some concern that younger readers will internalize the notion of unhealthy codependent relationships, such as may be perceived between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, in the Twilight series[3]. Young adult author Ellen Hopkins (Crank and others) was asked to sit out of the Humble ISD Libraries’ Teen Lit Festival after middle school parents, alerted by their school librarian, voiced concern that Hopkins’ work was not appropriate for their children. Other young adult authors pulled out in support, citing the “disinvitation” as a form of censorship.[4]

But the fact remains that for better or worse, there are gatekeepers in young adult literature who ask for benchmarks to guide acquisition and reading recommendations of our books. These issues are on the minds of authors like us, who may write about black magic and human sacrifice in one series (Wicked), and get asked by an editor to delete mentions of underage drinking in another. Andrew Smith, author of The Marberry Lens, warned educators and librarians at the annual Southern California Independent Booksellers Association tea in 2010 that he liberally dropped the F-bomb in the book; while our copyeditor for Unleashed queried our editor regarding the use of “bitch.”

Because authors have websites and Internet presence these days, we employ a number of strategies to steer readers to the work we have intended for them. Some authors use variants of their names to signal if a work in hand is for adults (Lilith Saintcrow) or minors (Lili St. Crow) or create separate websites/portals for their adult and children’s titles (Kelly Armstrong and Neil Gaiman both do this, for example.)

Some educators and authors opine that young readers will select themselves out of reading material that is not suited to them, and therefore no attempt at self-selecting is necessary. At a recent school visit, the librarian thanked one of us for talking about comic books because “I just want them to read something. Anything.” Barnes and Nobel shelved the volumes of the Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass and others) in the children’s, young adult, and adult fiction sections, but elementary school children reported that the books were boring and too long. [5] Younger “Twihards” informed us that they stopped reading the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, which things got too “yucky.”

Authors of teen and children’s fiction often face a sort of either/or question when we are approached by potential readers: Kids want to know if our books are “good” (entertaining) and adults want to know if our books are “good” (well-written and treating of substantive themes.)

With Unleashed, our new series, we’re very lucky to be able to point to a large stack of enthusiastic reviews by journals such as Kirkus and readers both young and old, while also pointing out that Unleashed is “King Lear with werewolves”—a fact that prompted one teacher at a book signing to select it from among our three series. In Unleashed, we’ve also made an attempt to explore potentially dangerous friendships and romances without endorsing them. Foremost on our minds is telling a good story, but we are cognizant that readers younger than we have anticipated might pick up our books—these days, there are some pretty young “young adults” in the reading population.

Add this book to your collection: Unleashed

For more information, visit: http://debbieviguie.com/ and http://nancyholder.com/

[1] http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklistsawards/bookawards/margaretaedwards/maeprevious/08edwards

[2] http://booksyourkidswilllove.blogspot.com/2011/03/harry-potter-is-not-childrens-book.html

[3] http://www.tipsbytony.com/2009/11/why-every-school-should-study-twilight/

[4] http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/home/886402-312/ellen_hopkins_uninvited_to_lit.html.csp

[5] Interview with Maile McKeon, former children’s librarian at Miramar Ranch Elementary School and children’s section lead at Barnes and Noble, Mira Mesa, Ca.

Last Minute Christmas Gifts

Bianca Schulze — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 03:18:55 +0000

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: December 17, 2011

Looking for some last minute gift ideas? Here are some fun books and book related items that you can’t go wrong with. There is something for everyone—babies to teenagers! Just click on the images to learn more …

The Adventures of Tin Tin: Season 1 (DVD)

The Magic School Bus: Oceans (Nintendo DS—Ages 5+)

The Giant Book of Giants (Ages 4+)

The Girls' Book of Secrets (Ages 8+)

A Pocket Library: Oh, David! (Ages 0+)

Star Wars: Darth Vader, A 3-D Reconstruction Log (Ages 5+)

Ripley's Believe It or Not! Strikingly True (Ages 10+)

Tiffany's Table Manners for Teenagers (Ages 12+)

Modern Art Memory Game (Ages 5+)

The Odyssey: A Pop-Up Book (Ages 8+)

Source of items: Publishers and publicists.

Yona Zeldis McDonough: From Madame Alexander to Marilyn Monroe

Bianca Schulze — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:37:28 +0000

By Nicki Richesin, The Children’s Book Review
Published: December 5, 2011

Yona Zeldis McDonough

Yona Zeldis McDonough is the talented author of many books for readers of all ages: fiction and non-fiction for adults and award-winning children’s books. She has most recently written the highly anticipated second book in her Doll Shop series, The Cats in the Doll Shop. Although a prolific writer, Yona still makes time for school visits and readings. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Nicki Richesin: It’s a great pleasure to interview you. You have proved a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction for adults, in addition to your award-winning children’s books. My daughter adored The Doll Shop Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop. Could you explain how you first discovered Beatrice Alexander, or Madame Alexander as she’s known, and how her story inspired you to write about the resourceful Breittlemann family?

Yona Zeldis McDonough: I remember Madame Alexander dolls from my own childhood. I longed for them though I never had one back then. As an adult, I started collecting dolls and bought a few of Mme. Alexander’s creations for my collection. When I was reading about her early life, I found out that her father owned and operated America’s first doll hospital. It was on the Lower East Side and the family lived in an apartment above the shop. Beatrice (she was Bertha in those days) and her sisters were allowed to play in the doll hospital sometimes and when I learned that, I just knew: here was a perfect setting for a children’s story.

Many of your books are set in Brooklyn, where you live with your family. Why has this area of New York proved such a “fertile ground” as you put it in your work?

YZM: I love Brooklyn. It’s so vast and filled with its own history, character and even mysteries. It is both a part of New York, and yet retains a separate identity. I grew up in Brooklyn and so it holds many associations for me.

You’ve written a great many biographies for children, including most recently Louisa: The Life of Louisa May Alcott and The Doll with the Yellow Star. You collaborated on your earlier biographies with your mother the painter Malcah Zeldis. How did you enjoy working on these projects together?

YZM: As one friend said to me, “Your mother is not a person, she’s an event!” I very much enjoy working with her. She’s lively, passionate and has lots of great ideas. We brainstorm to find subjects on which we want to collaborate; we’re a very good team.

I understand you’re putting the finishing touches on a new biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder for Holt. Wilder has such a devoted following and even after all these years, her Little House books have remained in print. You must have felt a bit of a responsibility in honoring her memory for her fans. Did you discover any interesting details about her life?

YZM: The sheer volume of material on Wilder is formidable and I am not sure I found much that was new. However, I do think I offer a new and perhaps feminist interpretation of the material. In the bio I wrote, I tried to stress how her mother’s influence did so much to shape her life. Her mother was an educated woman, and wanted her daughters to be educated as well. She read to them, and did her best to see that they went to school, which was unusual for the time and their circumstances. Even after Laura’s older sister Mary went blind (from an illness), Laura’s mother was insistent that she receive an education, and managed to save enough money to send her to a college for the blind in another state. I was so struck by that. Most people would not have thought educating any girl was so important, yet Laura’s mother made so many sacrifices in order for Mary to have an education and become self-sufficient. And later, Laura communicated her love of learning to her own daughter Rose; Rose became a well-known journalist and author. I tried to stress the continuity there: how the love of books, of reading and writing, was forged and passed on by mothers to daughters.

I read on your blog that you’re putting together a new collection of stories loosely based on the lives of your American parents who lived in Israel during the fifties. You were born in Chadera while they lived there. What have you learned about your parents or yourself while doing your research?

YZM: I can’t say I learned anything factual about my parents or their past; even though my stories are based on real events, I have completely made them over, cannibalized them if you will, in my writing. The stories are more about the search and less about the discovery. I’ve also enlarged the canvas to include some stories about my grandmother as a child and a young woman; one of these stories takes place in Russia, a place I have never been but long to go. And in my fiction, I can.

You edited a highly praised collection of essays about Marilyn Monroe, All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader. Why were you initially drawn to this project and why do you think Marilyn has held such a fascination for her fans? Will you go see the new film My Week with Marilyn?

YZM: She is that forever compelling combination of beautiful and damned. Her Cinderella-like transformation from unwanted orphan/abused foster child to Hollywood star fulfills a very powerful fantasy so many of us seem to have. I have mixed feelings about the new movie; MM’s presence was so incandescent on screen that I see no need to watch someone impersonate her. Yet the film will add to the discussion in some fashion and I suppose I will succumb.

What are you dreaming of writing now?

YZM: I’m working on a new novel set in 1947 in both New York and Connecticut. And I have some children’s projects, both fiction and non-fiction, that I’m hoping to get launched as well.

December, 2011: Best Selling Kids’ Books, New Releases, and More …

Bianca Schulze — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:20:30 +0000

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: December 1, 2011

Here’s the scoop on the most popular destinations on The Children’s Book Review site, the most coveted new releases and bestsellers.

THE HOT SPOTS: THE TRENDS

Kids’ Christmas Books: For the Naughty & Nice

Cedella Marley Inspires with “One Love”

Author Interview: Gary Paulsen

Review: Scat by Carl Hiaasen

Where to Find Free eBooks for Children Online

THE NEW RELEASES

The most coveted books that release this month:

Witch & Wizard: The Fire

by James Patterson and Jill Dembowski

(Ages 11-15)

Big Nate and Friends

by Lincoln Peirce

(Ages 8-12)

Artemis the Loyal (Goddess Girls)

by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams

(Ages 8-12)

Pretty Little Liars #10: Ruthless

by Sara Shepard

(Ages 14-17)

THE BEST SELLERS

The best selling children’s books this month:

PICTURE BOOKS

Home for Christmas

by Jan Brett

(Ages 0-5)

If You Give a Dog a Donut

by Laura Numeroff (Author), Felicia Bond (Illustrator)

(Ages 3-7)

The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse

by Eric Carle

(Ages 0-5)

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories

by Dr. Seuss

(Ages 6-9)

Press Here

by Herve Tullet

(Ages 4-8)

CHAPTER BOOKS

Heroes of Olympus, The, Book Two: The Son of Neptune

by Rick Riordan

(Ages 9-11)

The Heroes of Olympus, Book One: The Lost Hero

by Rick Riordan

(Ages 9-12)

Wonderstruck

by Brian Selznick

(Ages 9-12)

Every Thing On It

by Shel Silverstein

(Ages 8-11)

LEGO Star Wars Character Encyclopedia

by DK Publishing

(Ages 12 and up)

PAPERBACK BOOKS

The Red Pyramid

by Rick Riordan

(Ages 10 and up)

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer

by John Grisham

(Ages 8-12)

The Book Thief

by Markus Zusak

(Ages 14 and up)

Thirteen Reasons Why

by Jay Asher

(Ages 12 and up)

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie

(Ages 12 and up)

SERIES BOOKS

Inheritance

by Christopher Paolini

(Young Adult)

The Twilight Saga Collection

by Stephenie Meyer

(Ages 12 and up)

Percy Jackson & the Olympians

by Rick Riordan

(Ages 9 to 12)

Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset

by Suzanne Collins

(Ages 12 and up)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

by Jeff Kinney

(Ages 9 to 12)

Know of any kids’ literacy or author events that are happening during the months of December or January? Leave your suggestion in the comments field below.

Interview with Angelica Shirley Carpenter Biographer of Children’s Book Authors

Bianca Schulze — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 07:15:28 +0000

By Nicki Richesin, The Children’s Book Review
Published: November 27, 2011

Angelica Shirley Carpenter

Angelica Shirley Carpenter is the author of many acclaimed biographies written for young people including Frances Hodgson Burnett: Beyond the Secret Garden, L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz, Robert Louis Stevenson: Finding Treasure Island, and Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass. She also edited In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Carpenter is the founding curator of the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at California State University in Fresno.

Nicki Richesin: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. I know our readers will be fascinated by your writing life. You have established an impressive career as a biographer of many beloved and celebrated children’s book authors including Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Carroll. How did you first begin writing your books?

Angelica Shirley Carpenter: I began about 1988 when my mother Jean Shirley retired and moved from St. Louis to live near me in Palm Springs, Florida. Mother had already published several biographies for children and she arrived in Florida with a good idea for a new one, about Frances Hodgson Burnett. Oh, and she wanted us to write this together. In St. Louis Mother had found and read The One I Knew the Best of All, Frances’ autobiography of her childhood, and she thought that it would make a good starting point. I was running a small public library at this time, and I knew that children still read and loved The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, so I agreed that Frances would make a good subject. We established that the only biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett for young people had been written by her daughter-in-law in 1965. It lacked illustrations and, worse, it omitted certain incidents that were embarrassing to Frances’ family, like her divorce and remarriage. So we decided to write a more accurate account of her life and to try to publish it with photographs and illustrations from her books.

Your mother Jean Shirley was your co-author on three of your books. Could you tell us about her influence on your life and how you collaborated together?

Jean Shirley & Anjelica Carpenter

My mother was always a writer. When I was a child, her stories and poems were being published in magazines. She could type faster than 100 words a minute on her manual typewriter. She couldn’t cook very well (luckily, my father did), so our kitchen was always filled with the clatter of typewriter keys and stacks of papers. This all seemed normal to me. When Mother moved to Florida, she founded the first Florida chapter of what was then the Society of Children’s Book Writers. This effort helped her to make new friends of all ages. At first I resisted her efforts to get me involved, or to write with her, but finally she convinced me that Frances would be a fun project.

We collaborated easily because even though I was inexperienced, she let me take the lead. She knew how bossy I was, and I think that she was grooming me to be a writer on my own someday. When we worked together, we would agree on what should be covered in a chapter; then we each wrote our own version. Then we read them aloud and combined the two. Mother taught me all the writerly tips for writing biographies, or anything else, for that matter—observing the rule of three, ending chapters with cliffhangers, arranging quotations to look like dialogue, putting all five senses into every chapter, foreshadowing, replacing adjectives and adverbs with strong verbs—all those important ideas and more, plus she was a living grammar book. I never had to look up grammar or punctuation—I could just ask my mother. We had a wonderful time reading our work together and we discussed every single word. When the books were published, we had fun doing school visits together, too.

Click image to magnify.

You have dedicated a great deal of your professional life to studying Frances Hodgson Burnett. I was surprised to learn, having grown up with great admiration for The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, that Burnett’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy was her most successful book during her lifetime as Americans were quite taken with its rags to riches storyline. Did this come as a surprise to you when doing your research? Burnett led a somewhat unconventional life by Victorian standards. Were there certain periods of her life that you found remarkable?

It wasn’t just Americans who were fascinated with Fauntleroy—the British loved it, too, and it was read around the world, wherever English was spoken or studied. It was the Harry Potter of its day, made into a hit play and eventually a movie starring Mary Pickford. It was marketed with a lot of tied-in products. I read it for the first time as we worked on the biography, and quite enjoyed it. It was written at a time (in the mid-1880s) when society was changing drastically due to industrialization and new methods of travel. After a hundred years of independence, America had developed a national character that was distinct from Britain’s, and the British were curious about what their former subjects were up to. Frances, who crossed the Atlantic 33 times, wrote from both points of view, British and American, and helped to explain the two societies to each other.

She did live a fast-lane life for a respectable Victorian lady. Mother and I eventually met her great-granddaughter, Penny Deupree, who said that her mother and aunt (Frances’ granddaughters) would never even talk about Frances. They were scandalized by her divorce and remarriage. When I tell children this today, they are amazed. Many of the things that Frances did were unusual then—she dyed her hair, wore makeup, smoked cigarettes, and spent a lot of time unchaperoned with good-looking younger men. She married one of these, Stephen Townesend, her second husband, but when he turned out to be an abusive bully, she left him, too. None of this seems shocking today, but the fact that she left her young sons for long periods, up to a year at a time, does seem hard to understand.

I remember reading that Lewis Carroll was inspired by Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Alice Liddell. Some of Carroll’s photographs were considered quite scandalous. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland seems like a psychological study of how children act as adults by playing pretend yet are confused by the narrow rules adults enforce, just as Alice must determine how to navigate Wonderland. Could you briefly explain the role Alice Liddell played in Carroll’s writing and how his photography informed his work?

Alice Liddell was Lewis Carroll’s muse. He met her as he began his career as a mathematics tutor at Oxford University. She was the daughter of his college dean. Oxford in those days was all male, but Dean Henry Liddell was hired, unusually, as a married man with a family. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, became a family friend. Soon after the dean was hired, Lewis Carroll bought a camera. He learned to use it by taking pictures of the Liddell children in the deanery garden. He told them stories, as he had done for his own ten brothers and sisters. The oldest Liddell child, Harry, was often away at boarding school. Lewis Carroll saw more of the three eldest sisters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith, who were educated at home. The stories Lewis Carroll told the girls were based on incidents from their lives at Oxford—croquet games, boating trips, and tea parties—familiar experiences reinvented with humor and a kind of incomprehensibility that children must experience all the time.

In his youth Lewis Carroll had longed to be an artist, but his talent for drawing was limited. Photography let him express himself visually, using principles he had studied as a would-be artist. Like other Victorian photographers, he sometimes photographed nude children; such photos were considered symbols of innocence in that male-dominated era. Unlike the other photographers, he became a best-selling children’s author and so his four surviving nude pictures are better known. His hundreds of photos of children are now considered the finest ever taken of children in Victorian times. He was a perfectionist in his photography and in his writing, too. Perhaps the earlier control over photography gave him the knowledge and the confidence he needed to exert the same kind of control over his writing and publishing.

You’ve made many literary pilgrimages over the years to Oxford, Kent, Newcastle upon Tyne, Sissinghurst Castle, among many other famous landmarks. Of all the trips you’ve made, which was your most rewarding and/or fascinating for you as a biographer?

It’s hard to say—each trip seems like the best until I start planning the next one. Certainly one of the most exciting days was on my first trip to England, in 1992, when I got to visit the walled garden at Great Maytham Hall in Kent. Frances Hodgson Burnett leased Maytham Hall from 1898-1907. Although she set The Secret Garden in Yorkshire, the garden she wrote about was that garden in Kent. I went there on a dazzling summer day with my husband and daughter, who was a college student at the time. They waited patiently while I ran around crying and taking pictures—I was overjoyed to be there. At the time, Great Maytham Hall had been made into apartments for retirees, who took turns showing guests around the garden. Our guide was Bill Brewin, who became a friend for the rest of his life. We returned several times, but that first viewing was the most exciting.

I had the pleasure of seeing you speak at the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco a few years ago. For many years, you have organized international conferences through the Arne Nixon Center where you work as the founding curator. Could you tell us about the annual events that you host and any upcoming events you’re planning?

As founding curator of the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at California State University, Fresno, I have gotten to try a lot of new ideas. One goal was to put this new Center on the map by sponsoring conferences, which brought people here from around the world. The first one, in 2003, was a Burnett conference—amazingly, the first one ever held about this famous author. It resulted in a book, In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett. In 2004 the Arne Nixon Center hosted the Children’s Literature Association’s annual conference. We have had good luck working with literary societies—the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, the British-based Beatrix Potter Society, the International Wizard of Oz Club, and the Friends of Freddy (the Pig). The Center’s annual event is a Secret Garden Party, hosted by our Friends’ group, ANCA, the Arne Nixon Center Advocates. ANCA held the first Secret Garden Party as a fundraiser for the Burnett conference. People in Fresno have lovely gardens, which they like to showcase. So ANCA planned a party, but kept the location secret until people bought tickets or sponsorships. The idea proved so popular that we kept having Secret Garden parties, changing themes, so that we had an Oz Secret Garden Party, an Alice party, a Cats party (to celebrate the acquisition of a collection of 6,000 cat books), and last year a Centennial Secret Garden Party, with a fashion show commemorating the University’s 100^th birthday. You can see photos from all our events at www.arnenixoncenter.org. The 2012 Secret Garden Party will have a Cuban/Spanish flair because we will be honoring authors Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy.

We just hosted a big conference in October, the ninth United States regional conference of IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People. This was coordinated with a major exhibition, “Down the Rabbit Hole with Lewis Carroll and Leonard Weisgard.” So we are taking a bit of a breather, and doing some needed fundraising, before planning any more conferences.

Meanwhile we are working to promote our new collection of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning) books, which we think is the largest such collection of these books for young people in any library. My colleague, Jennifer Crow, is developing a traveling exhibition of these books that, with suitable funding, we hope to send out to California high schools.

You’re working on a new biography of Matilda Joslyn Gage for young readers. Why did you choose Gage as a subject and what has proved the most interesting about this project so far?

I found Matilda through her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books. Mother and I wrote our second biography about him, so Matilda has been on my radar since then. She was a famous feminist and author in her own right, but she is largely forgotten today, due to some skullduggery by Susan B. Anthony. Late in their lives, Anthony ousted Matilda from the organization they had co-founded and co-led for decades, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the main writers of the women’s movement. They co-authored the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, still the most important history of the women’s movement in the 1800s, and in 1893 Matilda published Woman, Church, and State, in which she attacked organized religion for oppressing women. So she is an interesting and controversial character, who, after she was widowed, spent winters with her daughter Maud and her son-in-law L. Frank Baum. It is fun to think of Matilda and Frank, writing very different kinds of material under the same roof, and I don’t think that it is a coincidence that, when you look at Frank’s 14-book Oz series, you see that Oz is a paradise ruled by women.

As a biographer, I’m sure you come across many enigmatic and captivating historical figures during your research. Is there one person you hope to write about that you haven’t yet had the opportunity to investigate?

The early feminists are interesting me now—I think that we need to know more about them, and not just about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Recently the literature about civil rights history written for young people has expanded to include new subjects, people like Claudette Colvin and Bayard Rustin. I think that women’s history could use a similar expansion, but I don’t yet have any particular new subject in mind. I have to finish the Matilda book first. I’m calling it The Forgotten Feminist: Matilda Joslyn Gage.