I write, read, and teach young adult and middle grade fiction.
Mom. Humor-and-drama-loving kid at heart. Fan of the unexpected. Respecter of the Unexplainable. Optimist.
@annjacobussf on Twitter
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:22AM While all humor shares certain similiarities, a kid's sense of humor is different than that of an adult! Duh. As posted on ReaderkidZ: http://www.readerkidz.com/2012/02/07/funny-books-rule-why-kids-love-them/
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 6:41PM As posted at http://www.readerkidz.com/essays/characters-families-and-challenges-a-personal-story/
It’s fitting that I’m writing about family from my mother’s house where I’m staying for a few weeks to help out. She is under hospice care after battling colon and lung cancer for the last two years.
Families are there for us when we encounter hardships and challenges. In real life this is great. In fiction, it’s problematic.
Children’s book writers put young characters in trouble and then let them solve it. Allowing an adult to solve a child’s story problem is a no-no. It squelches character growth (art imitates life) and young readers won’t be interested. What if the Mounties found Brian as soon as his plane went down in Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet?
Writers know that it’s a good idea to get the adults, especially parents, out of the picture--render them distracted, impaired or otherwise missing. Or kill them off. A parent’s death can even be the challenge the character is facing, as in Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.
Some of the loads of fictional orphans out there who spring to mind are Harry Potter, Gilly Hopkins, Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, Mary in The Secret Garden. Maniac Magee, Corinna in The Folk Keeper, the four siblings in Dicey’s Song, and Cinderella, of course. Even in Good Night Moon, there are no parents—in the story anyway. Just a quiet old lady who appears to be some sort of temp.
Many more children’s characters live with only one adult: siblings in Little Women, Sarah, Plain and Tall, and The Penderwicks; protagonists in When You Reach Me, What Jamie Saw, One Crazy Summer, and the Joey Pigza books, to name a few.
Fictional children do of course have intact families and involved adults. As a fourth-grader, I loved The Little House on the Prairie series where Ma and Pa and the kids worked so hard they made me long to chop wood or boil some clothes. Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had loads of family, and they all loved and believed in Charlie. Their problem was being desperately poor and about to perish, as the four grandparents in one bed aptly illustrated. More recently, the challenge of having an autistic member within a traditional nuclear family came alive for me in Cynthia Lord’s Rules. And Sophie Hartley, from the eponymous series by our own Stephanie Greene, has a wonderful family and still has plenty of problems to solve, including her relationships with her family.
So my real-life family is facing a challenge—the final days of our mother’s life, although happily my siblings and I are long past childhood. And like a good book, it is a journey, filled with tears and laughter, and the remarkable process of letting go. The last few evenings, Mom takes her morphine, I have a generous glass of Chardonnay, and we watch a couple of episodes of Modern Family from the DVD my cousin delivered. I admire the writing and the deft blend of humor and poignancy in this series. Mom and I laugh because we recognize ourselves and our extended family that is a mishmash of young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, able and disabled, Republicans and Democrats, Religious and non, Blue and Red State residents. We’re nothing if not fodder for good comedy.
Because of the pain medication she is taking and also because of the disease itself, Mom’s losing short-term memory, word recall, and sadly, now reading. She taught my three siblings and me to love books from an early age, reading aloud to us such books as E.B White, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Karla Kuskin, and Maurice Sendak. She reports that now The Dallas Morning News looks like it’s printed in a foreign alphabet. As we have always done, my brothers, sister and I joke around with her, presently by breaking into charades when she is frustrated in recalling a word. Then she cracks up. It’s also fitting that I can now read to her; from the paper, her beloved mysteries, emails and cards from friends, a manuscript of mine (she’s always been my best audience), and I hope soon to read her some of the wonderful spiritual readings from www.hospice.org.
I’m grateful that I can be a part of my mom’s last stage of life, a challenge and joy for us both. We’ve returned to our easy familiarity and occasional sniping, the memories we share, the hardships we’ve been through, the many laughs we’ve had, and now our reversal of roles. This is what family is for.
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 8:50AM Friday, June 10, 2011 at 5:56PM What could be more surprising than Victorian mice orchestrating their clueless humans' social affairs during a trans-Atlantic sail? SECRETS AT SEA is Richard Peck’s latest delightful middle-grade novel, with lovely soft-edged illustrations by Kelly Murphy. It's due out this October from Dial.
This is a charming historical novel about mice, and that’s a phrase I’ve never written before. It stars mice siblings, in fact, and the oldest sister Helena, like every good eldest sister, is in charge and naturally, the narrator. Most of the story takes place during a trans-Atlantic crossing aboard a great ocean liner due to reach England in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It’s a mice-tale of manners, a swirl of romance and royalty, ball gowns, weddings and many coursed-meals, whether with humans at the Captain’s table or at the mice’s yardstick table on thread spool seats.
The mice siblings live with the wealthy, but comic and all-too-human Cranston family who are headed for London to find suitable matches for their two daughters. Mrs. Cranston in particular says all the wrong things with, as described by one passenger, “a voice like the cawing of a crow,” displaying “shoulders like sides of beef.” The mice sisters, Helena, Beatrice and Louise, and their pesky brother Lamont, all hate water, but accompany their human family tucked away in their steamer trunks. They find the ship teeming with a hierarchy of all classes of mice also accompanying their human passengers, and of course, a ship’s cat. Helena and her siblings work feverishly behind the scenes, relying on every rodent social connection they can muster to compensate for the clumsy Cranstons, and match-make for the deserving Cranston girls. They are aided by, among others, Nigel the Mouse Steward, the old Duchess of Cheddar Gorge who has “terrible teeth and breath that would kill flies,” and dashing Lord Peter, Mouse Equerry.
To the reader’s happy satisfaction, mice and humans both find plenty of romance and adventure at sea. Best of all, Peck’s trademark dry humor and sly sense of fun are in full play on every page of SECRETS AT SEA.
