Children's literature - or children's writing?

Unfortunately, the latter is by no means the former.

Read no further, if you're looking for formula-written, mediocre, "contemporary" and "relevant" children's writing. The field of children's writing has not only become big business. It has also, in the words of The Economist, become a matchless area for adult propaganda.

No wonder so many children have switched off reading, given the tedious formulae prioritised by too many children's publishers, as part of the whole politically correct invasion of the field of children's writing. Today's awards,  grants, publishers' demands are largely established to confine the writer to currently politicised criteria.  

This trend of recent years envisages the writer as a sociologist, a virtual social welfare worker there to deal with young readers' supposed problems.  Out, on the whole, have gone works of genuine imaginative accomplishment.  In  have come the pedestrian, the well-meaning, the mediocre, and ultimately the boring  products of a vision of  writing for children  - not as a mean of stretching them imaginatively, extending their horizons, their imaginative and intellectual awareness  -  but of confining and reflecting back to them  to the limits of their own supposed, restricted worlds. 

The emphasis and demands by publishers for "contemporary" and "relevant"  writing, focusing on this supposed teenage world, with all its envisaged problems, has resulted in the sidelining of standards of excellence, of writing of genuine quality, in favour of proselytsing our children through the books today being inflicted on them. Is there an issue of supposed teenage angst and social disadvantage which the "in " books for teenagers, enthusiastically endorsed by do-good adults in the book milieu, haven’t yet inflicted on today's unfortunate young readers? Questions of national identity; of biculturalism; of supposed "sexual identity"; lesbian and homosexual issues; of bullying; of indigenism;  of racism; of  coping with disadvantage; with being too fat; with being too thin; with blended families; with death, drugs, suicide -  with being handicapped: in a myriad ways  an adult world is intruding and dumping on young readers. This is a movement in full swing.  

The result, of course, is a rejection of reading by many youngsters  who want what young readers have always wanted - a great story, well told.  The kind of book parents who were themselves great readers remember, and pass on to their children, are the real stories, genuinely imaginative tales which yield more at each reading, which leave echoes lingering in the mind, stories which a child will want to pick up and read all over again. 

The phrase "children's literature" is today used too loosely, to describe quite mediocre, lightweight, formula-written books of  often poorly constructed writing, and of little lasting value.  Literature they are not. When enthusiastically endorsed by teachers,  librarians, and reviewers, sometimes because they are by well-known writing establishment "names,"  the effect is to make youngsters either  distrust the adults concerned, or mistrust their own judgment, and lose their enthusiasm  for reading.   

The trend towards depressing, traumatic, so-called "realistic " stories in fashion since the seventies with those who envisage the writer-as-therapist are causing increasing concern, as the rate of mental illness and suicide among young readers escalates. Australian psychiatrists have recently questioned the accumulative effect on youngsters of reading  dealing with death, depression and other morbid themes, of the negative world-view either directly or indirectly centre-staged  by authors and publishers.  The latter are now targeted for being more interested in ease of  marketing, and in producing books that resemble junky, if popular television programs, than in promoting quality writing.

The books published by The Medlar Press are books those of genuine imaginative quality, written for the child, intermediate, or young  adult reader who loves to read.

Parents looking for genuine stories in the tradition of the Once upon a time…tales that caught the imaginations of listeners and readers, and transported them, at least for a time,  from their own, perhaps insular surroundings, returning them a little the wiser, can safely recommend Amy Brooke's stories  to their children.  Behind every genuine writer there is a voice with something to say, and hers is of a world of imaginative vision, of freshness and hope, where the philosophical issues underlying the great classics of children's literature provide, unobtrusively, a solid foundation for young readers, in the tradition of classic story-tellers.