At a New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association panel about "tween readers," Stephanie Anderson of WORD bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., suggested that "the crux of this debate is we have 8- to 12-year-olds and YA. Should there be another shelf in between?"
Association of Booksellers for Children executive director Kristen McLean moderated the panel, which besides Anderson included Liz Szabla, editor-in-chief of Feiwel & Friends, and Deborah Roffman, a sexuality and family life educator and author of Sex and Sensibility: A Thinking Parent's Guide to Talking about Sex.
McLean, whose background is in children's books and toy companies, credited the toy market with inventing "tween" as a category. "Fifteen years ago the toy business realized that the definition of 'child' was changing," she explained. Children from up to age eight were considered the target for "play-based toys," but a "tween" category would skirt the area between play and "life skills."
"I'm 24," Anderson said. "My generation is the first to grow up with a YA section in the bookstore." Books dealt with "drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll," she recalled. "There was a lot of boundary-pushing." Ellen Hopkins and Lauren Myracle were banned. But, she argued, reading those authors' books "didn't hurt me or any of the people I know. I learned that meth is a bad idea." Still, Anderson also said that strong readers at the age of 12 often think they're "too smart" for teen books.
Then there are the parents who think Twilight is appropriate for their 10-year-old. "I tell them, maybe this [the first in the Twilight Saga] is acceptable, but book #4 has this," said Anderson. "Then you have the parent who responds to a suggestion of The Secret Garden with 'They'll be too sad.' I just have to walk away from that." She said she believes the best ammunition with the 10-year-olds themselves is to tell them that Twilight is boring. "It is boring when you read a book that you're not ready for yet," she said.
Roffman, who has been teaching human sexuality at the Park School, Baltimore, Md., since 1977, said she "used to think we were bipolar in this culture. Now we're full-blown psychotics about sex." She cited the "sexy Halloween costumes for six-year-olds," and took issue with the term "tween" because it is "not a bona fide developmental stage." She blames the marketing machine: "They decided that eight-year-olds were short teens, and teens are short adults," Roffman said.
Szabla, like Anderson, expressed concern that elementary students are reading Twilight. A former bookseller, Szabla said that the best way to sell a children's book is still word of mouth. "If a friend is reading it, they have to have it." After that, favorite authors, the cover and the title are other great selling points. She held up as an example Jordan Sonnenblick's Dodger and Me with an all-out boy-appeal cover and Ann M. Martin's Everything for a Dog, which invites both boy and girl readers. (The topic of book covers could have commanded its own panel discussion: booksellers chimed in on various series makeovers that either did a disservice to the books or confused their core readership.)
Another challenge for booksellers is that "kids often know more than the bookseller," McLean pointed out. "They know laydown dates and even obscure authors." She urged greater collaboration among children, booksellers, teachers and librarians and suggested that the "ongoing discussion" among parents is, "Do we have a protective approach, or do we read with them and talk about it, looking for the teachable moment?" "We can't say to the customer, 'You're being too protective,'" McLean said.
Ellen Mager of Booktenders' Secret Garden, Doylestown, Pa., said that another common dilemma is parents who say, for example, "I have a fourth-grader reading on an eighth-grade level." Mager said she tries to address this with the kids themselves by asking them to write in-store reviews. "I'll pull out eight books—Hugo, the Magyk series and Charlie Bone for kids who want 'big' books, and then Diary of a Wimpy Kid," she said.
"The more conservative a parent is, the more concerned they are about the topic itself. There's an inherent power in sexuality," Roffman said. "The extreme liberal parent believes [the children] can read anything they want." She argued that "context is key." Are sexuality and graphic violence inherent to the story's development or are they there to titillate? Anderson said she often recommends Pure by Terra McVoy, which "discusses sex in a way that's okay," (the teens wear purity rings, and when one friend breaks their vow of chastity, they discuss what that means). Anderson also often recommends to parents that they read a book before giving it to their children.
"But what about the kid who's trying to work through something alone?" asked Francine Lucidon from the Voracious Reader, Larchmont, N.Y. "I ask kids, 'What do you like?'" But Roffman countered that "It's the adult's responsibility to keep a child in a child's world and to set limits. They're already being told, 'Everything's for you.'" McLean said she'd like to see booksellers use the editing mode in the Edelweiss software to enter notes on individual titles and discuss these topics.--Jennifer M. Brown