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I've been reading bits and pieces of the comments over on

meganbmoore's LJ post about a librarian whining that all the YA books are for girls and boys need books too*, which reminded me of a page on our Special Collections site about early book series about young aviators, girls as well as boys. I managed to find** at least one of them available in ebook format a year or so back and read part of it. I really need to track down more of them, because they're sort of cool. :D

* Conveniently forgetting the majority of children's and YA literature throughout history, which has male protagonists.

** I think, perhaps, by mentioning it in a post here and one of you tracking it down and linking me. :D

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If you ignore the Nancy Drew chatter at my post, I think you're left with maybe 20 comments...

Edited 2009-07-21 17:33 (UTC)

Ack! Not the Honey Bunch books! I had those as a child. Honey Bunch (real name: Gertrude Marian Morton) is a preternaturally good little girl who enjoys housework and is always up to inoffensive hijinx with her best friend Norman. My father used to tease me about them - suggesting new titles for the series, like Honey Bunch and Her First Little Nuclear Reactor - until I wised up and realized that they were tripe.

I don't remember the airplane book, but given my recollections about the series, I doubt Honey Bunch did anything on the plane aside from being pampered by the stesardesses and perhaps shown the cockpit.

I'm wondering whether the problem with the librarian who wanted boys' books was that many of the newer books that have garnered positive reviews have female protagonists. Except for, like, The Graveyard Book and a dozen others. Maybe she's convinced that boys can't be made to read anything that doesn't have characters playing videogames and surfing the Intarwebs, so she's only interested in recent stuff. The part about singling out specific books that could have had male leads instead was especially strange.

I wonder if it's occured to her that part of why people start writing is as a reaction to what they see/read, so a sudden onslaught of YA about girls on adventures might be pretty indicative of what's out there beyond the last couple of years. I also suspect that boys aren't reading because all the games, shows and movies for their age group are written for and focus on boys, whereas girls pretty much only get female leads in books.

I think that makes a lot of sense - most of the guys I know (yeah, older than the YA target audience, but still similar) get most of their narrative fiction from movies and videogames instead of books. (And the books they're buying are comics and RPG manuals, but I'm a member of a hardcore gamer geek set.)

yes, have had discussions about
this before among YA writers. it's
an issue of marketing. even i,
as a teen, had gone directly from
mostly middle grade to the grown up
fantasy section in the book stores.

boys are still doing that. and i think
many publishers are trying to amend
that--but it's all a matter of placement
and marketing.

hopefully the tide is changing, as with
more multicultural books and authors, etc. =)

even i,
as a teen, had gone directly from
mostly middle grade to the grown up
fantasy section in the book stores.

I started reading adult fantasy at 12-13 (whenever it was that Terry Brooks's Elf Queen of Shannara came out in paperback) because it was the only book I saw that looked adventure-y and had a full clothed girl on the cover.

Yeah. I skipped the Babysitter's Club et. al completely because they were too juvenile for me.

*Raises hand* Librarian in training currently completely the Media For Children requirements:

A+ series with both male and female protagonists:

The Awakening, Book One of the Quantum Prophecy, which was AMAZING. Two male protagonists, one female: one male protagonist is cliche, the second one is not so much, and the girl has some serious (good!) problems. I could not put it down, but do not remember the author.

I also have-- *squint* depending on the age, I've got like, six other books.

Of course, this reading list was made up in like .. 198something, so the professor's books kind of suck. :/ C.S. Lewis does not a balanced world portray.

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