Village Books Blog

What Should Teens Read?

Way back in June 2011, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that challenged contemporary young adult literature for being too dark for teenagers. The backlash was significant, with authors, editors, publishers, booksellers etc. all chiming in to protest the merits of darker YA lit. (See below for more links.)

But the debate isn't new. What should teens read? Do parents have a right to monitor what their teenagers read? Do they have a responsibility? What age are we talking about? Limiting what a twelve-year-old reads is certainly different than limiting what a seventeen-year-old reads.

I’ll come right out with my opinion: teenagers should be allowed to read what they want. I believe this even for the twelve-year-olds, though it completely baffles me when I meet seventeen-year-olds who “aren’t allowed to read that.”

My opinion does, of course, come from my own experiences, so I don’t mind sharing. My parents let me read whatever I wanted, a privilege I took for granted until recently. When I started attending literature conferences and discovering in debates that many parents screen what they allow their teenagers to read, I promptly called up my mom and thanked her for never doing that to me.

Do you know what happened when I picked up a book that was too dark for me? I put it back down. I understand the impulse to choose what your child reads. These parents were somewhat demonized in the debate back in June, but it stems from a desire to protect and I would hardly call that evil. I’m not a parent myself, but I can see how difficult it must be to watch your child, who you’ve provided for since infancy, grow up and start to make their own choices, especially when you aren’t convinced those choices are the right ones.

When we read about the worst possible scenarios, we learn more about ourselves and more about the world. And we’re learning in a safe place. Part of the worry about letting teenagers read whatever they want is that they’ll be exposed to something they’re not ready for. However, I think young adults deserve more credit than that.

Bringing the focus back to young adult literature, though, these “dark” books are actually very, very important. Through books, teenagers can learn about date rape, hate crimes, severe consequences of bullying, and eating disorders, to list four of a million. Reading about uncomfortable topics helps us to define our own lines of what is and is not okay and how we might act in certain situations that we hope we never actually encounter. In a way, reading is training…for life. A recent psychological study even concluded that people who read a lot of fiction are far more empathetic and skilled at interpreting social situations that those who read little to none. Reading teaches people to view the world not only their own experience, but through other people’s perspectives.

Far too often I hear stories of awful things happening to teenagers, things that might even have been avoided if the teenagers hadn’t been so sheltered. Using my four examples from above: girls who were date raped before they ever knew what that term means, prejudice that escalated into hate crimes because no one could see how a few comments could build to something worse, bullies who don’t realize how crippling their “teasing” can be, girls who literally starved themselves to death without knowing that most teenagers struggle to find a healthy relationship with food, their own body, mirrors, and the media’s obsession with physical perfection. Reading is the enemy of ignorance. (I feel like I should put on a cape after that line, but I still believe it wholeheartedly!) Every time we read a good book, whether or not it’s a dark one, our worldview shifts ever so slightly, sometimes noticeably if it’s an amazing book.

What about when a book is required reading? I’ve been saying teenagers should be allowed to choose what they read and I think that’s a two way street. If they want to read a dark book, I hope no one will stop them. However, if they don’t, I hope no one will force them. As I’ve already said, I think most teenagers have a better measure of what they’re ready for than we expect, especially in terms of a personal experience like reading. Many adults simply don’t like dark stories and they’re not lesser people for it. For some of us, reading these darker stories can help us understand society and ourselves. Others wonder why they would hunt out pain in fiction when there’s already an overabundance in the real world. Just as I believe teenagers are entitled to read dark literature if they want to, I also believe it doesn’t make them naïve if they prefer and stick with lighter stories.

So far my argument, and a lot of other ones that I read, misses a key factor. I’m not suggesting that you hunt down any young adult book with a dark and disturbing premise and shove it into a teenager’s hands. It’s all in how the topic is handled. I have read books in which disconcerting factors - rape, incest, pedophilia, murder - seem to be tossed in there to appeal to the reader’s morbid fascination with such topics. The nail in the coffin is when these books don’t really address any of the depth behind the can of worms they opened. How does the victim recover? How do people on the outskirts of the situation handle it? How does it ripple through the community? When a book forces me to think, especially to reevaluate my opinion, I will not condemn it if it had some painful moments or plot threads. It’s only when books present disturbing topics as a little extra spice for the plot that I’m enraged to find the darkness there.

In the end, I’m shocked when teenagers are actually discouraged from reading. Even when I do read a terrible book (be it bad writing, stock characters, one dimensional plot, or an overbearingly didactic subtext), I still learn from it. Either as a writer (“That character seems to be an afterthought; I should be sure to give all of mine, even the minor ones, their own story”) or as a person (“It angers me that the character seems to bear no psychological scars from being raped. That undermines women who have actually been raped and how hard it is to recover”). All books, even the ones we dislike, throw open the doors for discussion. Even when that discussion is only in our own mind, we still learn from it. Closing those doors is never the answer.

-Rachel

Here are some further links that relate to this discussion topic:

-Sherman Alexie’s response

- NPR response

- Guardian response

- #YA saves

- Publisher’s Weekly response

- Child psychologist’s response

- Eighth graders chime in

- NYT article and discussion

 

villagebooks.com

rachelannhanley.blogspot.com

Guest Blog Post: Joshua McNichols

Bellingham native Joshua McNichols is author of The Urban Farm Handbook: City-Slicker Resources for Growing, Raising, Sourcing, Trading, & Preparing What You Eat, available at Village Books. He’s currently working on a novel about Kurdish refugees he met while living in Greece.

When I graduated from high school in '92, I received as gifts 5 different dictionaries. I took them to Village Books, which kindly gave me credit. I told the staff "I'm interested in philosophical stories." All the staff got involved, and they filled my arms with a huge stack of books: "thinky" novels that jump started my love of reading. Collectively, the towering stack of novels came to me at a critical moment. I was a freshly un-caged teenager, blinking in the sunlight of adulthood.

I have forgotten some of titles they recommended, but several have become lifelong friends:

• The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi
• Landscape Painted with Tea by Milorad Pavic
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Mauthausen by Iakovos Kampanellis
• The River Why by David James Duncan
• Probably something by Tom Robbins
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
• Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
• Ulysses by James Joyce (okay, that one took me a few years to appreciate)

That summer, my Village Books picks accompanied me to Europe, where they filled one of my two bike panniers.  As I cycled in a big circle around the continent, I met many people in hostels, sometimes slept on their living room floors. But in between cities, long stretches of solitude offered many reading places. I read in a rickety wooden lookout tower in a cherry orchard above the Rhine. I read in a Swiss hayloft, my muscles aching from the journey over the pass. I read on a salty windswept bench in the French Camargue while eating dense Roma-made bread and honey. Though I left many of the books in hostels and living rooms, they stayed with me. Somewhere along the road, the voices in those books merged with my voice and became a part of me. I emerged from that trip a “thinky” kid with a newly calibrated moral compass. As I made the life choices that would define me as an adult, I had faith in words to help me navigate, or at least document, the journey.

Last month, I had the chance to return to Village Books as an author. I considered it a small chance to give back to a bookstore that had given me so much.

Thank you Village Books, for taking pimply teenagers seriously, and for taking dictionaries in trade for credit.

www.villagebooks.com

 

Andrew Recommends History

My criteria for a good history book is simple:  when I finish reading it, the world should appear completely different.

With that in mind, I recommend:

1)  GUNS, GERMS & STEEL by Jared Diamond. If you haven't read it, it's not simple enough to explain in a sentence. But it is not so complicated that it can't be summed up in a 5-paragraph essay. This is not the first book to merge human history with natural science (Ferdinand Braudel comes to mind.) It is, however, the most cogent, simple, and straightforward examination of the natural factors which created the disparities between various human societies.

2)  THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin. You might not think that the history of oil could be such a page-turner, but Yergin's book is just that. Intimate portraits of fascinating people and in-depth studies of the formation of dominant groups, such as Standard Oil, Aramco, and Royal Dutch Shell are turned into astonishing action stories. If nothing else, Yergin's book should convince you of the central significance that oil has played in every corner of our economy and every turn of history. If you don't know the history of oil, you don't know the history of the world in which you live.

3)  1421:  THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED AMERICA by Gavin Menzies. The treasure fleet of Admiral Zheng He is no longer lost to history, but its course and its impact have remained buried by astonishing accidents and a revisionist narrative that puts Columbus and Magellan in Zheng He's place. His fleet circumnavigated the world, made contact with the Aztecs (remember Montezuma mistook Cortez for Quetzecoatl? Was he expecting more of the civilized Chinese?), and dropped off colonies across the Americas. His map -- or part of it -- ended up copied in the hands of a Venetian sailor. What happened next is so strange it could only be real.


I also like a good read, and for that I can recommend:

1)  THE GUNS OF AUGUST, by Barbara Tuchman. Anything Tuchman writes is a good read, but this story, about the months before and after the outbreak of World War One, is an astonishing narrative with all the power and drama of the best Tom Clancy.

2)  AT HOME, by Bill Bryson. Only Bill Bryson could get away with writing a travelogue after walking through his own house. Not as funny as NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, not as pretentious as A REALLY SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, but still classic Bryson describing the origins of toilets, sofas, crown molding, and so much more.

3)  JUSTINIAN'S FLEA, by William Rosen. An offshoot, perhaps, of GUNS, GERMS & STEEL, Rosen applies the lessons of natural history to the last great moment of the Roman Empire. This is about  Byzantine emperor Justinian II and his infamous wife Theodora, his general Belisarius and Belisarius' warrior wife Antonina, and how they reunited the vast majority of the old Roman empire, only to lose it to a plague spread through...yes...climate change.

4)  THE AMERICAN FUTURE by Simon Schama.  If you feel like getting nostalgic for 2008, this is a perfect read.  But the power of this book comes from Schama's unearthing of forgotten or overlooked moments in the history of the United States.  This book is well-worth picking up if only to read about Montgomery Miegs, Robert E. Lee and the founding of Arlington National Cemetery.  And for the moment Schama meets G.W. Bush in London and feels compelled to cheer him up.

Rachel's Review of Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Rachel runs our VB Reads Young Adult Book Group and VB Reads Fantasy Book Group. She's a reader among readers for sure! You can check out her own blog by clicking here or see what other books she recommends by clicking here.

I've discovered another magical find! Daughter of Smoke and Bone starts with an offbeat, attention-grabbing scene that hooked me immediately, and it didn't take long for my intrigue to spark into infatuation. I'm a reader who can easily put down a book, even when I'm adoring it, because now and again I like to do other things, like eat or sleep. That's why it's all the more impressive when I find a book so good that it calls to me even when I'm trying to finish some actual work.

I've mentioned before my stance that there are two kinds of gifted writing: that which turns invisible and that which demands admiration. Taylor's is the latter. I was hyper aware of the writing style at all times, but in a positive way. She handles words with such love, devotion, and care that I frequently paused my overeager reading rush. Not only does Taylor craft unique turns of phrase and evoke intense sensory imagery, but she does so on almost every single page. There were a handful of times when the writing stumbled over itself with a jerky point of view change, such as when the author inserts her own voice to tell us pretty obvious details about a character like that the protagonist is very mysterious, but those awkward moments can be counted on one hand.

The pace is the work of a master, hitting a nice balance of suspense without frustration. A lot of information is withheld, something that can easily, and often does, annoy me, but in this case it worked. Karou, the mysterious protagonist, knows as little as we do (often less), so I enjoyed the journey of rediscovering a forgotten past with her. Taylor feeds her readers new information on this imagined world and its secrets in little bites that kept me constantly appeased: never starved, never bloated.

After finishing the book, I realized it's a fairly direct Romeo and Juliet spin-off, only with so many added layers and so much entrancing world-building that one might miss that. The back cover describes the story as a forbidden love tale; however, it actually takes quite a while, perhaps a third of the book even, for that portion of the story to take off.

As a brief summary, Karou lives among humans, but she was raised by chimaera, creatures with mixed human and animal features. While she has mortal friends and does in fact share her fantastical life with them, they all assume the bizarre tales and drawings are nothing more than the work of a creative imagination. Karou's guardian, Brimstone, sends her out on strange, disturbing, and sometimes dangerous errands to collect human teeth, though he refuses to explain their purpose...which I never could have predicted!

My only annoyance with this book is that I wasn't aware it's the first in a series until I neared the end and found myself mentally chanting, "How on earth will she wrap this up in only twenty more pages? In only ten? Five? Two?" Then I reached the last line "to be continued" and did feel quite disappointed to know I wasn't anywhere near reaching a conclusion. However, I do believe that if someone starts this book with the knowledge that it's the first in the series, it does find as nice a closure point as possible with such a grand plot, though I admit the end was the only time when my nicely fed reader's appetite felt the slightest bit starved.

This book slides under your skin. The writing reaffirms the power of words and the story hums with fervent emotion throughout, including hope's struggle against a wall of tragedy. From the tensions of a double life to petty (in comparison) social concerns to a tone that can hit hilarity, woe, and romance right on target, there's never a dull moment!

Guest Blog Post: Art Wolfe, 'Dogs Make Us Human'

Premier wildlife photographer Art Wolfe has released a groundbreaking tribute to canine and human friendship around the globe in his latest book, Dogs Make Us Human. He will be at The Leopold's Crystal Ballroom on Thursday, November 17, 6:30pm.

Like many American families, my family always had dogs. My favorite was a good- natured, scruffy mutt named Wolfy. I took him everywhere I went. He was the great companion of my youth. I think we spent more time hiking in the Cascades than at home in West Seattle.

Since the first wolves were lured to Middle Eastern hearths between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, humans and dogs have forged a strong, interspecies bond. This bond, born of necessity and molded into the deep recesses of our psyches and culture, is the foundation of our canine helpmates, companions, workers, medical lifesavers, friends, family members, objects of value and sometimes even, food.

As long as I have been photographing, dogs have been a focus for my lens. Wherever there are humans, there are dogs and how we humans treat them runs the gamut. One man’s pet is another man’s fetish. At a medicinal market in West Africa, I saw rows upon rows of dog heads along with desiccated chameleons, primates, crocodiles, and ungulate horns. In Japan, the cutest of the cute Poms, Pekes, and Yorkies in designer jackets rule the roost. My travels have shown me uncomfortable extremes in humanity’s dealings with dogs, but most importantly much of the joy that characterizes that core relationship.

Dogs Make Us Human is a celebration of the positive aspects of the relationship: it’s charming, upbeat, and while my photos show the remarkable bond canines and humans have, New Zealand-based, NY Times bestselling author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s words speak to it directly. How from Manhattan to Mongolia, dogs enrich our lives, help make our lives less difficult, help us live longer. I have certainly witnessed this first hand through many cultures since I started traveling the world. 

Nearly thirty years ago I made my first trek to the Tibetan Himalaya on the Ultima Thule expedition from Seattle; the goal for most on that research expedition was to summit Everest, but for me, I yearned to see the culture. Roaming the streets of Lhasa, I came upon numerous round little children with their round little dogs and I was captivated. These encounters in the remote corners of the world are the most special of all: days spent in with the Dani tribe in Irian Jaya, witnessing their daily tasks, which include affectionate interaction with their wiry dogs; with the Yanomamo in the cloud forests of Venezuela, who colorfully adorn their prize hunting dogs as they adorn themselves; with the Tsaaten, the reindeer people of Mongolia, who have big, hairy dogs to protect their priceless herds from wolves and bears.

It was not until recently that I really started concentrating on photographing dogs in “western” cultures. While there are geographical and cultural pockets where dogs are still working animals, such as New Zealand, I would say for the most part we a significantly different relationship with our canine friends. They have insinuated themselves deeply into our family life—sometimes seeming like the only family we have; they have various professionals who take care of them—the vet, the groomer, the walker; dogs are a booming economy. But seriously, as Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson points out, in all these photographs of peoples from around the world with their dogs, we see evidence of the same deep feeling, the same deep pleasure in “otherness” that we can only have with a creature who returns the trust, the friendship, and the love. Our species has been blessed.

A Little Something about Missed Connections

It’s no secret that I’m a sap for a good love story (a good one. Not a Nicholas Sparks one.) So when I happened upon the art of Sophie Blackall, my heart swooned. Sophie takes Missed Connections listings and turns them into whimsical illustrations that I want to hug. When I first discovered her art, I went crazy printing out my favorite illustrations and hanging them up in my apartment (they’re still there). I mean, isn't there something beautiful about us unknowingly leaving an impression on a complete stranger?

I had kind of forgotten about Sophie’s work (even though I look at it nearly every day when I walk through my apartment) until I received an adorably wrapped package—brown packaging paper, red & white yard tied carefully around it and only these words on top: Do You Believe in Love at First Sight? Was I, the romantic, intrigued? You better believe it! I opened the package with a care of a 5-year-old on Christmas day (who am I kidding, I'm still that 5-year-old) and voila-lo-and-behold-before-my-very-own-eyes was a copy of Missed Connections: Love, Lost & Found by Sophie Blackall. How did I not know this was being made into a book?! I should have been the first to be alerted! I can’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure I “squee-ed” and jumped up and down. Sounds like something I would do.

Point being, Sophie Blackall’s art is now a book. A book that proudly sits on my shelves and that I adore with all my heart and soul. And if you’re not familiar with her artwork, you should check it out. And if you love her art as much as I do and/or are as big of a sap as I am, then you absolutely must check out her book, because it’s such a brilliant little book.

--Lindsey

For more of Lindsey's book picks, click here.

Guest Post: Stacy Carlson, 'Among the Wonderful'

Stacy Carlson is the author of Among the Wonderful. She is a native of Seattle and she now lives in Oakland, California. Among The Wonderful is her first novel.

Shapeshifter. Boundary crosser. Messenger. Patron saint of in-between places. Prankster, catalyst, maker, destroyer. Trickster is hungry, mischievous, selfish, sacred. He disrupts, disobeys, and has a hand in creating our world.

I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest so Raven is the trickster that roosts in the belfry of my heart. His nest is made of barbed wire. He incubates the glittering gems of my wildest ideas. His black wings protect and also ruffle and rearrange my thoughts and creative work.
Other tricksters inhabit my personal pantheon: Bjork, Bill Hicks, Tom Waits—each with their uncategorizable gifts that surprise, guide, disorient, and inspire me.

One trickster arrived in my mind and would not leave for eight years. He played with my ideas about art, deception, spectacle, anomaly, and community, and made me consider, for the first time, the peculiar ingredients that comprise an American sensibility. He toyed with me to such an extent that I wrote a novel through which I expressed my fascination with him and the worlds he created. This figure seemed to embody what Byrd Gibbens meant when he wrote, “People cannot pray until they laugh, because laughter opens and frees us from rigid preconception. Humans have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that without them they would forget that the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise.”* This trickster who got under my skin is Phineas Taylor Barnum, and beneath his appetite for wealth and fame, beneath the deceptions he teases us with, the elaborate ruses he uses to mystify us, and behind the caricature of the rotund ringmaster seen from afar, he guards an incredibly vital sacred kernel: our sense of wonder.

People tend to say that PT Barnum was a man ahead of his time, but what that really means is that he ignored or manipulated the rules of society so that he could reach beyond them toward his vision of a wonder-filled world (and his own cash-filled pockets, because he is  a trickster after all). He was the conjurer of public imagination. He ushered America into its modern age of entertainment/education. He conflated the two, and we’ve been confused about the borders of each ever since. I fell in love with the idea of a moment in America when the modern age was born, and I recognized Barnum as the trickster-midwife who delivered it.

If tricksters are wanderers and boundary dwellers, then PT Barnum is their king. In his sixties, he joined forces with James Bailey to travel the railroads with his famous circus, of course. But before that, for the forty-plus years of his earlier career, he ran a labyrinthine Pandora’s Box of a museum on lower Broadway in New York City. It was a place where wandering was the whole point. There was no one destination, but a multiplicity of experience so vast as to boggle the mind and so doing, open it to the sacred element of wonder. Acrobats, glass blowers, a menagerie of live animals, and a community of human marvels. Around every corner were puzzlement, doubt, scandal, horror, and beauty.

My novel, Among the Wonderful, is set in this baffling museum. In true trickster style Barnum is known mostly by word of mouth. He is not the hero of this story, but his imagination, ambition, and skill as a showman are the context. Because the museum is his creation he is responsible for the transformations that take place in the hearts and lives of the people within its walls. In the book, Barnum is a problematic guardian of our senses of wonder, with mixed motives and questionable ethics. He is charming, disconcerting, and we can’t help but follow him into the labyrinthine halls of his museum, his great ark for public imagination.

*Epigraph from George Carlin's book, Napalm & Silly Putty

Guest Post: Andrew Laties, "A Houseful of Books"

Andrew Laties is a champion of bookstores and booksellers. He's the author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Bookstores Represent Everything You Want to Fight for from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities. He'll be part of a panel discussion with Village Books owner, Chuck Robinson, Book Fare Cafe owner, Charles Claassen, and Derek Long, Executive Director of Sustainable Connections, on Friday, September 16, 7:00pm.

    This month marks the 26th anniversary of the opening of The Children’s Bookstore, the first of my five bookselling enterprises. I passed the “one million sold” mark years ago. Why do I sell books? I grew up surrounded by them. My father, now 85, is an obsessive lover of bookstores. My two sisters and I took for granted frequent bookstore visits, and our consequent houseful of books.

    In 1970, at age 10, I helped my older sister Nancy organize my parents’ collection. We put Poetry at the top of the stairs, History at the bottom, Fine Arts in the bathroom, Literature in the basement. We counted 3,000 books. Browsing my parents’ books over the course of my childhood was a mysteriously immersive activity that provided an unsupervised introduction to world culture, science and the arts.

    On weekends and holidays, outings to bookstores topped the agenda. My father’s rule was that if you entered a bookstore and stayed for 15 minutes, you were obliged to support that store by buying a book, so at every bookstore, we kids were encouraged to choose books for ourselves. I came to specialize in mythology, archaeology, European literature, and modern poetry. My bedroom filled up with books I had chosen. At age 15, on a solo bus-ride, I reviewed my childhood visits to bookstores and was able to visualize 500 stores.

    No wonder I married a bookstore manager, and thought it would be easy for us to open our own bookstore.

    Our children had an even more book-obsessed upbringing than my own, since for them, frequent visits to bookstores went along with growing up inside a family business. Our home came to overflow with books. During our 2002 move to Amherst, Massachusetts, after 17 years running bookstores in Chicago, I took stock of our personal collection. We had over 10,000 books. Handling each book as I packed for our move reminded me of the place of its purchase and its place in my history. 

    I have watched the recent national collapse in bookstore numbers with dismay. There used to be over 10,000 bookstores; now there are so many fewer. I know lots of kids grow up in homes without books.

    I am making an effort to help reverse these trends. I want all children and parents to have access to the joy, solace, and sharing of values that a houseful of books has represented in my own life.

    Rebel Bookseller is the principal tool in my effort. I hope the book helps convince literature lovers, community activists and budding entrepreneurs to support and launch independent bookstores, helping families fill homes and lives with those most life affirming of cultural artifacts, books.

Guest Post: Kirby Larson, 'The Friendship Doll'

Kirby Larson is the author of the 2007 Newbery Honor Book, Hattie Big Sky. She will be at Village Books on Saturday, September 10, 2:00pm for her latest book, The Friendship Doll.

    I played with Barbies growing up (whatever happened to Midge?), and still have my Meg of Little Women Storybook Doll. But generally I was the kind of kid who preferred running around outside or reading. Dolls just weren’t – aren’t – my thing.  

    So how is it that I came to spend five years working on a book about a one? To steal a line from the movie Shakespeare in Love: “it’s a mystery.”    

    The mystery began in the basement of the Montana Historical Society. I was researching for Hattie Big Sky, rummaging around in a room full of odds and ends. Between some enameled coffee pots and kerosene lanterns I found a photograph, dated 1928:

(photo credit: Montana Historical Society)

    I was fascinated. How did this little Montana farm girl and this exquisite doll find one another? They seemed such unlikely pals given dicey US/Japanese relationships at that time. I wrote myself a few notes about the photo and tried to put it out of my mind in order to finish my novel. But every once in awhile I would allow myself a few minutes to work on the puzzle of girl and doll. I eventually learned that these Friendship Dolls were gifted to the children of the United States by the children of Japan in thanks for some 13,000 blue-eyed baby dolls sent in 1927 as part of a church-based goodwill project. The man behind that project, Dr. Sidney Gulick, a missionary to Japan, was broken-hearted over the bad blood between the two countries he loved. He knew what a treasured place dolls held in Japanese culture, ergo, the doll drive. He also knew that Japanese people were reluctant to accept a gift without giving one in return so he did his best to assure that no thanks were needed for the baby dolls sent by American Camp Fire groups, Scout troops and Sunday school classes.   

    His words went unheeded. Every child in Japan contributed one sen, about half a cent, to pay for the Friendship Dolls. Master craftsmen competed for the honor of making one. About the size of a 4- or 5-year-old girl, they had gofun (ground oyster shell paste) faces and limbs and real human hair, styled in a dark bob. In all, 58 were created – one for each prefecture in Japan, as well as its territories and major cities. When completed, the dolls traveled by steamer to San Francisco and then were divided into smaller groups to tour the States. They visited big cities like New York and Washington, D.C., but visited small towns, too, like Pomeroy and Pullman. After a year of touring, the dolls were given homes in each of the 48 states (some states received more than one). Miss Tokushima, Washington state’s doll, now resides at the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane.   

    Okay, okay: so the dolls are historically interesting. But why write a historical novel about them? Honestly, I had no intention of doing so until I “met” Miss Tokushima in about 2005. One look at her expressive face and pensive eyes and I was certain she was trying to tell me something. And I was certain that what she was saying was this: tell our story.    

    Discovering that story took me many years and many false starts. Eventually, I heard the tart voice of Miss Kanagawa, a doll who had as much use for a child as a dog did for a flea and I was hooked. I suspected that today’s readers could genuinely connect with kids living through the tough times of the Great Depression and so the story is set primarily between 1927 and 1941 and tells how one Japanese doll impacts the lives of four girls -- and one contemporary boy.    

    Of the original 58 Friendship Dolls sent to the states, 13 are missing today, including Miss Kanagawa. Maybe, just maybe, one reader of The Friendship Doll will help solve the mystery of those missing dolls. Wouldn’t that make a great ending to this story?

For more information about the Friendship Dolls, go to http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu

For more information about Kirby, go to www.kirbylarson.com or www.kirbyslane.blogspot.com
  

Literary Personal Ads

I was a reader from early on, reading as many books as I could during the school year, then checking out books from the library during the summer. Many of these books simply slipped through my fingers, the result of poor writing or embarrassingly bad plots or subject matter that just didn’t stick with me, but others have helped define who I am today--those books that did stick with me, that set a baseline for every book I now read or think about reading (who doesn’t have a massive to-read pile?) So I started to think about those books, the ones I always rattle off when talking about my favorites, the ones that never lose ground with me. What if I were to write a personal ad based on my favorite books and authors? It’d look something like this:

I’m a Monster at the End of This Book, The Phantom Tollbooth, Book Thief sort of girl who longs for creepy nights with House of Leaves, lazy Sundays with The Book Thief, Douglas Coupland, and The Lonely Polygamist, adventures with City of Thieves and The Night Circus and wild nights with The Last Werewolf, Don Quixote, Tom Robbins, and Vonnegut. If you’re looking to be Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, give me a call.

My mom might say that makes me sound like a questionable lady, but I'd beg to differ.

What would your literary personal ad say?

-Lindsey