A perk of teaching 9th grade (trust--they're few and far between) is the ready availability of young adult literature. I enjoy seeing the new stuff that's coming out and it's fun to revisit favorites from years ago (in my case, MANY years ago). With an awful lot of testing sessions this time of year, I end up with more downtime than I'd like, so...
I took a look at two that I recalled from childhood. One holds up very well; the other not so much.
Virginia Hamilton's The House of Dies Drear had largely faded from my memory, except for the name. First published in 1968, the name seems pretty hokey. I mean, really--"Dies Drear?" OK, we get it. This is going to be a spooky story. But it worked, didn't it? After forty years I remembered the title. Since I didn't remember anything else about it, I decided to give it a shot.
It turned out to be pretty good. The titular Mr. Drear was an Ohio abolitionist; his house (a giant mansard-roofed pile) was a stop on the Underground Railroad. In the present, our juvenile protagonist, Thomas Small, moves into the house with his history professor dad, his mom and younger twin brothers. Weirdness commences almost immediately; there's a huge old caretaker named Pluto, lots of secret passages and requisite freaky threatening neighbors. On their first night in the house someone sneaks in and hangs triangular symbols on the family's bedroom doors.
This is still a young adult piece, so nothing REALLY horrific happens, but it's enough to give you the willies all the same. There's a bit of a Scooby Doo ending in which nothing is actually supernatural, but the work of...well, no spoilers.
An interesting aspect of the novel is that the principal characters are all black--but, unlike most novels featuring minority characters, Dies Drear doesn't overtly disclose this until well into the book, when the Small family attends church and Dad talks about the importance of church within the black community. I found this rather significant. Hamilton chooses to focus on developing her characters as individuals rather than obsessing over race. She still acknowledges the importance of cultural background, but lets you get to know the characters first. You aren't coerced into making assumptions about them.
Since it's a Gothic novel aimed at the junior high set, it doesn't really have too many elements that would date it terribly. Sure, the weird caretaker and the weird neighbors use horses to get around, but that's pretty clearly to heighten the reader's understanding that they're weird. A haunted house is a haunted house, and this one is worth keeping.
When I was eight (I'm basing this on the knowledge that I was in the third grade), I was forbidden to read--or rather, to continue reading--Harriet the Spy. This would be because I, following in the ill-advised, but interesting, footsteps of the title character, decided to start recording my observations. Unfortunately, some of the things that I documented were, while quite true, not very nice. (Sorry, but I bet that cross-eyed kid did feel weird.)
I forgot about Harriet until (I thought a few years ago, but turns out it was 1996--time flies when you're getting old) a movie version was released. I didn't see the movie and, now, forty-ish years since my mother told me to stop reading it and twenty-three years after the movie, I got around to finishing the damn book.
It really isn't that bad, and if my mother had let me read the whole thing, I would have gotten the full morality play treatment. It's pleasantly unsaccharine. Harriet doesn't learn not to be naughty. She learns that sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.
Which is probably a very 1964 way of looking at things; it wasn't quite as much of black-and-white moral. (Oh, the book was published in '64.) Young adult literature has a habit, by necessity, of being as up-to-date as possible. Obviously, the authors need to appeal to their target audience, and their target audience has little interest in anything that's more than a week out of style. This tends to serve the authors very well, bankroll-wise, but doesn't serve their work very well longevity-wise. Harriet is no exception: with its blocky, pen-and-ink caricaturish illustrations, it's already a dead giveaway for 1964. Add in Harriet's family situation. Dad works in television; he and Mom go to lavish parties every weekend for which they must don full evening attire. When she's not at school--a private one--she's mostly raised by her nurse, Ole Golly. Oh, and of course they live in New York, but in 1964 upper middle class people like this still existed in New York. Harriet wants to be a writer; her friend Sport wants to...guess? and her friend Janie has a chemistry set and wants to blow up the world. Oh, and Sport's dad is an alcoholic writer (couldn't get away with that one in modern YA lit). Also, the parents of the kid group gossip about each other relentlessly.
So it really is 1964 in a nutshell: lots of reinforced stereotypes, especially the Italian family (I wonder if those even still exist in Manhattan?). You get the petty world of Harriet's parents, a crazy cat guy, a bonbon eating old bat, a sports-crazed boy, and then you get the Girl Power characters of Harriet and Janie.
The themes ring true, and are constant--but it's spoiled for modern YA audiences by being very dated. While my students would probably enjoy The House of Dies Drear, Harriet is entrenched too deeply in a world that most teens can no longer understand. It's rather a pity that Mom didn't let me finish it; I might have learned that no matter how great a person's faults, one mustn't point them out. I wonder if that cross-eyed kid ever got surgery.
I took a look at two that I recalled from childhood. One holds up very well; the other not so much.
Virginia Hamilton's The House of Dies Drear had largely faded from my memory, except for the name. First published in 1968, the name seems pretty hokey. I mean, really--"Dies Drear?" OK, we get it. This is going to be a spooky story. But it worked, didn't it? After forty years I remembered the title. Since I didn't remember anything else about it, I decided to give it a shot.
It turned out to be pretty good. The titular Mr. Drear was an Ohio abolitionist; his house (a giant mansard-roofed pile) was a stop on the Underground Railroad. In the present, our juvenile protagonist, Thomas Small, moves into the house with his history professor dad, his mom and younger twin brothers. Weirdness commences almost immediately; there's a huge old caretaker named Pluto, lots of secret passages and requisite freaky threatening neighbors. On their first night in the house someone sneaks in and hangs triangular symbols on the family's bedroom doors.
This is still a young adult piece, so nothing REALLY horrific happens, but it's enough to give you the willies all the same. There's a bit of a Scooby Doo ending in which nothing is actually supernatural, but the work of...well, no spoilers.
An interesting aspect of the novel is that the principal characters are all black--but, unlike most novels featuring minority characters, Dies Drear doesn't overtly disclose this until well into the book, when the Small family attends church and Dad talks about the importance of church within the black community. I found this rather significant. Hamilton chooses to focus on developing her characters as individuals rather than obsessing over race. She still acknowledges the importance of cultural background, but lets you get to know the characters first. You aren't coerced into making assumptions about them.
Since it's a Gothic novel aimed at the junior high set, it doesn't really have too many elements that would date it terribly. Sure, the weird caretaker and the weird neighbors use horses to get around, but that's pretty clearly to heighten the reader's understanding that they're weird. A haunted house is a haunted house, and this one is worth keeping.
When I was eight (I'm basing this on the knowledge that I was in the third grade), I was forbidden to read--or rather, to continue reading--Harriet the Spy. This would be because I, following in the ill-advised, but interesting, footsteps of the title character, decided to start recording my observations. Unfortunately, some of the things that I documented were, while quite true, not very nice. (Sorry, but I bet that cross-eyed kid did feel weird.)
I forgot about Harriet until (I thought a few years ago, but turns out it was 1996--time flies when you're getting old) a movie version was released. I didn't see the movie and, now, forty-ish years since my mother told me to stop reading it and twenty-three years after the movie, I got around to finishing the damn book.
It really isn't that bad, and if my mother had let me read the whole thing, I would have gotten the full morality play treatment. It's pleasantly unsaccharine. Harriet doesn't learn not to be naughty. She learns that sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.
Which is probably a very 1964 way of looking at things; it wasn't quite as much of black-and-white moral. (Oh, the book was published in '64.) Young adult literature has a habit, by necessity, of being as up-to-date as possible. Obviously, the authors need to appeal to their target audience, and their target audience has little interest in anything that's more than a week out of style. This tends to serve the authors very well, bankroll-wise, but doesn't serve their work very well longevity-wise. Harriet is no exception: with its blocky, pen-and-ink caricaturish illustrations, it's already a dead giveaway for 1964. Add in Harriet's family situation. Dad works in television; he and Mom go to lavish parties every weekend for which they must don full evening attire. When she's not at school--a private one--she's mostly raised by her nurse, Ole Golly. Oh, and of course they live in New York, but in 1964 upper middle class people like this still existed in New York. Harriet wants to be a writer; her friend Sport wants to...guess? and her friend Janie has a chemistry set and wants to blow up the world. Oh, and Sport's dad is an alcoholic writer (couldn't get away with that one in modern YA lit). Also, the parents of the kid group gossip about each other relentlessly.
So it really is 1964 in a nutshell: lots of reinforced stereotypes, especially the Italian family (I wonder if those even still exist in Manhattan?). You get the petty world of Harriet's parents, a crazy cat guy, a bonbon eating old bat, a sports-crazed boy, and then you get the Girl Power characters of Harriet and Janie.
The themes ring true, and are constant--but it's spoiled for modern YA audiences by being very dated. While my students would probably enjoy The House of Dies Drear, Harriet is entrenched too deeply in a world that most teens can no longer understand. It's rather a pity that Mom didn't let me finish it; I might have learned that no matter how great a person's faults, one mustn't point them out. I wonder if that cross-eyed kid ever got surgery.
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