Children’s books on grown-up themes. On J. Boyne’s novels The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Boy at the Top of the Mountain

2021 ◽  
pp. 110-117
Author(s):  
M. V. Pozina
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Successful Career ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Big History

The essay is concerned with the work of the Irish writer John Boyne, who received international renown upon publication of his two young adult novels: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Boy at the Top of the Mountain. The two books are connected by the same topic — a child and the war — as well as an unconventional view of the fate of the small protagonist who becomes entangled in the big history. Among the characters of Boyne’s novels are children of high-ranking Nazis, prisoners of concentration camps, people inhabiting pre-war Europe, and even the Führer (Hitler) himself. The essay not only comments on the plots of the two novels, which follow the lives of Boyne’s young protagonists, but also suggests that everyone, including children, is responsible for their moral choice: whereas Bruno, the hero of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, remains pure in heart, his counterpart Peter (Pierrot) from The Boy at the Top of the Mountain becomes infected with Nazi ideology. In addition, the essay discusses certain facts of the writer’s biography, mentioning, in particular, that he turned to young adult fiction after a successful career in ‘grown-up’ literature.

Books Without Boundaries: Jewish Children's Books in the Secular Arena

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-101
Author(s):  
Carol Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Picture Book ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Jewish Writers

Books with Jewish content are of universal interest and are important to individuals and to society. Through humor and personal experiences in writing and speaking about my Ike and Mama series, my middlegrade young-adult books, as well as my picture book, God Must Like Cookies, Too, I communicate to publishers, authors, and librarians the ways that my books have crossed over to the general marketplace. Why and how this came to be, and the newfound inclusion and interest of Jewish writers in the "multicultural" designation are also examined.

scholarly journals Awards & Upcoming Events

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Desmarais
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Picture Book ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Short List ◽  
Comprehensive List ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Time Of Year ◽  
Book Publishers

Greetings! Summer is an ideal time to share news about annual children’s book awards because many of them were announced in the spring. InfoSoup provides a comprehensive list of awards presented each year by the American Library Association and other organizations. At this time of year I always like to have a look at the Canadian Children’s Book Centre website to remind myself of all the award competitions for Canadian children’s books. Here in Edmonton, the Book Publishers Association of Alberta announced a short list of three books in the Children’s & Young Adult category that all look very compelling.    A Sampling of Upcoming Events    October 3, 2020 Picture Book Summit is an online conference for illustrators and writers of picture books, but of course everyone is welcome. Registration is now open.    October 3/4, 2020 FOLD Kids Bookfest is a festival for authors and illustrators who create books for young people. This virtual event is designed for young people, but it will also include content for adult writers of children’s books. Registration opens on September 21, 2020.   October 24, 2020 Packaging Your Imagination is a conference presented by Canada’s Conference for Children’s Authors, Illustrators & Performers. Registration will be open in August 2020 and the event will be available via livestream (it will also be recorded).    I hope you all find the time to discover some wonderful children's books this summer. Enjoy the adventure! Best wishes, Robert

Welcome to our inaugural issue!

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Desmarais
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Honorary Doctor ◽  
The University ◽  
College Library

The University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) is delighted to have the blessing of Dr Andrea Deakin and the Okanagan College Library to assume all responsibilities of the eponymous “Deakin Newsletter” (www.okanagan.bc.ca), which is now renamed “The Deakin Review of Children’s Literature”. An enthusiastic team of book reviewers and editors from UAL will review English language children’s books and publish thoughtful reviews and recommendations using a four star system (four stars: highly recommended; three stars: recommended; two stars: recommended with reservations; one star: not recommended). With so many children’s books published each year we know that it can be a dizzying task to find the good ones, so we will make every effort to review at least 25 books in each issue (published quarterly), including pop-ups, ABCs, young adult fiction, picture books, ebooks, board books, and works of non-fiction. Nearly a year ago I had the opportunity to meet Dr Andrea Deakin over lunch and we talked for hours about children’s books. Her enthusiasm was infectious and I was in awe when I learned that she had been reviewing children’s literature in Canada for nearly half a century. She explained that her career as a teacher and book reviewer had offered so many rewarding opportunities to promote children’s literature, and in retirement she continued her prolific book reviewing activities in an electronic newsletter hosted by the Okanagan College Library. She was recognized for her exemplary contribution to the humanities when Okanagan College awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in 2004. Dr Deakin has earned her reputation as one of the great champions of children’s literature and we are greatly honoured that she has given us this wonderful opportunity to launch a new journal in her honour. The reviewed books will be catalogued and processed as a non-circulating special collection, The Dr Andrea Deakin Collection of Children’s Literature, which will be stored at the University of Alberta’s Book and Record Depository, and made available to researchers in the reading room of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. We welcome your comments and suggestions about our publication, so please send me an email if you wish to get in touch. Best wishes for a pleasant summer, filled with splendid children’s books! Robert DesmaraisManaging Editor

scholarly journals Diversifying Understandings of Diversity

Barnboken ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Kokkola ◽  
Sara Van Den Bossche
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books

This is a position paper by the guest editors of the Barnboken theme “Diversity in Nordic Children’s and Young Adult Literature” in which we propose that theorising and promoting diversity in the Nordic context would benefit from a broadening of the approaches that dominate the British and American contexts. We attempt to tone down the confrontational style of discussion by outlining the value of two non-political approaches to diversity: cognitive and imagological studies. The former highlights the neurological basis underpinning the desire to compare and the reliance on visual information in producing categories; the latter maps the ways in which images of nations are circulated. We then show how these approaches can dovetail with more politically motivated approaches – such as intersectionality – to produce a pedagogy of diversity. We do not claim that these are the only possible routes, and invite other scholars to diversify further. Our argument is that pitching the need for diverse children’s books solely on moral and ethical grounds has not had the pedagogical impact needed. We need to diversify approaches to analysing and promoting diverse literatures.

Creating a ‘Masala’ Self: Bicultural Identity in Desi Young Adult Novels

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Superle
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Small Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Bicultural Identity ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
Cultural Identity Development

In the past two decades, the previously silent voices of diasporic Indian writers for young people have emerged, and a small body of texts has begun to develop in the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the major preoccupations of these texts is cultural identity development, especially in the novels published for a young adult audience, which often feature protagonists in the throes of an identity crisis. For example, the novels The Roller Birds of Rampur (1991) by Indi Rana, Born Confused (2002) by Tanuja Desai Hidier, and The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen (2005) by Mitali Perkins all focus on an adolescent girl coping with her bicultural identity with angst and confusion, and delineate the ways her self-concept and relationships are affected. The texts are empowering in their suggestion that young people have the agency to explore and create their own balanced bicultural identities, but like other young adult fiction, they ultimately situate adolescents within insurmountable institutional forces that are much more powerful than any individual.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

The Adult as Foe or Friend?: Childism in Guus Kuijer's Criticism and Fiction

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Memorial Award ◽  
Adult Reader ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.

Life in the Open with Charles Frederick Holder

2014 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-221
Author(s):  
Jane Apostol
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Sport Fishing ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Natural Scientist ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Santa Catalina Island

Natural scientist Charles Frederick Holder settled in Pasadena in 1885. As a prolific author, lecturer, and editor, Holder was a key promoter of the region, sport fishing, and natural science. He wrote popular children’s books as well. He is also remembered as an influential figure in education and the arts and as a founder of the Tuna Club on Santa Catalina Island and the Valley Hunt Club in Pasadena and its Tournament of Roses.

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