The surprising, life-giving magic of devouring YA novels
Why battling sorrow and embracing magic make so much sense right now
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We are headed out on summer vacation soon and for me, vacation means one thing: a big old pile of books. My stack includes a combination of beach reads (Long Island Compromise) and memoir (I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, I Want to Burn this Place Down) and some meatier novels as well.
I. Cannot. Wait.
However, the best books I’ve read over this past year are books for kids.
Children’s books are hitting me in a new way right now, both because of the kind of reader my child has turned out to be – all fiction, mostly fantasy – and because of the state of the world we are in.
When I was a kid, the books I loved were all books about kids – mostly girls — and their relationships with their families: The Little House series, Little Women, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Anne of Green Gables. Their worlds were detailed and intimate, and relatively small.
I still love these books, and saved most of my copies for my child to read. Even though I have had to unlearn so much about the worlds they depicted – the rigid gender roles, the erasure of so many other people’s stories that made these ones possible – they are books that taught me about caregiving and community.
But the books I’m reading now with my child are books about kids and their relationships with the world. They are stories about shapeshifting, about worlds beyond what they already now, about power and violence, and about how to create chosen families.
To be sure, some of the books we read are just your standard YA fare. But the best of the books we read are rich, complex and radical in a way mine never were.
My favorites are the ones that explore the complex emotional terrain of human relationships, but are also threaded with the magic we suspect might exist in the world. They speak to the most horrible possible truths and still manage to assure me that another way really is possible. And, important, they are fantasy books that feature female characters.
One of my favorite writers for kids is Kate DiCamillo, whose books Tiger Rising and Because of Winn Dixie tore open my heart, stitched it up and made it stronger.
In an interview last year DiCamillo talked about how children’s books can help build what she calls “capacious” hearts – wide, roomy, inclusive.
Kids are aware of everything that’s going on around them, she said, and it's a disservice not to offer them hope and love. But kids' stories also need to tell the truth. “And the truth is that it’s really difficult to be here,” she said. “It is a huge gift to be here. It’s beautiful here.”
The question she puts to herself as a children’s writer, and to everyone writing for kids is this: “For all of us trying to do this sacred task of telling stories for the young: How do we tell the truth and make that truth bearable?”
Here are my top kids’ books of the year so far:
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill: The story of the City of Sorrows, where the inhabitants are forced to sacrifice their youngest child every year to feed a mythical witch. As it turns out, that witch is the invention of the towns’ rulers who use the threat of violence to maintain “a frightened people, subdued people, a complaint people.” Who are we willing to sacrifice today, we might ask ourselves, to maintain an illusion of safety? The story, which won a Newberry Award, unfolds the way children’s stories should: heroes emerge from surprising places, children become more powerful than grown-ups, and the world reinvents itself as the fog lifts over the city.
Nimona: We fell in love with the Netflix version of this graphic novel by ND Stevenson, which is zany and breezy and heartfelt. Like Barnhill’s book, this is a story about a city that surrounds itself with a wall to block out the rest of the world, one purportedly full of menacing, shapeshifting monsters. The central characters are a gay soldier and his sidekick Nimona, who was forced out of the city as a child because they could take multiple forms. The movie and the novel are proudly queer, and one review called it “a pointed allegory about politicians who build their national profile on the backs of queer and transgender children.” As the main characters fight back against exclusion and ostracism, the wall that surrounds the city falls, and shows its inhabitants a wider and even more beautiful world.
Grace Lin’s award-winning trio, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Starry River of the Sky, and When the Sea Turned to Silver, are classic stories of a young person who is forced into a journey without adults to guide them. Lin weaves Chinese folk tales through her stories, like the “Hundred Families Robe” in which one of the main characters wears a patchwork cloak in which blessings from a hundred families are woven into the robe in order to protect them.
Lin’s books are threaded with magic and with history, which put me in mind of another thing the author Kate DiCamillo has said: magic in books often just involves just the simple act of looking at something and wondering about it. The natural world is full of magic and wonder, she says. “Who knows what’s inside that squirrel? That squirrel could write poetry.”
Stories are a way to access something smarter and wiser than we are.
“Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything,” diCamillo says.
“And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.”
Sounds like a wonderful way to spend the summer.
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I love this so much!! So many parts I could highlight but this especially: "Kids are aware of everything that’s going on around them, she said, and it's a disservice not to offer them hope and love. But kids' stories also need to tell the truth. “And the truth is that it’s really difficult to be here,” she said. “It is a huge gift to be here. It’s beautiful here.”
Tears!!
I am currently on book 5 in The Vanderbeeker series with my 9 year old daughter. There was a death in book 4 and I don’t know, even if you haven’t lost someone close to you, you be able to understand the feeling of loss because of how well she wrote it. For kids and adults alike. I had to stop reading because I couldn’t see the words on the page or continue without crying. My daughter patted my arm and said she could finish the chapter for me. I recommend the series by Karina Glaser.