A Plea for Children’s Books 

There was a small corner of the library that no child ever strayed to. The book covers were monotones of dark and dreary colors and they weighed heavy in my pre-adolescent hands. Around the corner, my peers poured over shelves of thin, bright books, but I was alone to face my shelf. This is where the librarian led me on the first day of third grade.

We had been introduced to the library and the Dewey decimal system, which they insist on teaching at the dawn of each school year, and then they look up our reading level from our records and show us where we should be getting books. The librarian ran her wrinkled finger down the list and stopped at my name with raised brow. She led me away from my friends, and toward the adult corner. I tentatively pulled a book off the shelf and flipped it open. The print was small, and no pictures graced its pages. But the words were multi-syllabic, and even included some I didn’t know, so I lugged the text to the checkout line and waited my turn.

It took me two months to read Little Women. Well, that’s not entirely correct. Little Women sat next to my fireplace for two months while I avoided it. This was a first for me; I often complained to my mom that I read things too quickly, and we only went to the library once a month. Not that I didn’t try to read the monster of a novel (or so it seemed to me). I got about halfway through the book when I finally gave up, and I hate to leave a book unfinished. It wasn’t that it was beyond my comprehension (although I’m sure the finer points of the allegory escaped me), it was that I found the topic so incredibly dull that reading it was a chore. I might as well have checked out War and Peace for all it interested my third grade self. If I had not been born with an incessant love for reading, this would have turned me into a bibliophobe.

Here lies yet another demographic that falls through the cracks in our education system. Much attention is given to low-achieving children who need help with comprehension and encouragement to read, and the average child is motivated by contests and other strategies. But what of the children that are reading above their level? Are they not still children? I wanted to read about girls riding horses and having adventures, but I was reading on much too high a level for those books. I’m not the only child who was frustrated by this. I recently began college, and as I small talk with new people, I often ask who else reads (so far, I’ve found no one who reads voraciously as I do). Then I started asking why they didn’t read. The answer was that it stopped being fun.

So authors, I present you with a challenge. Write children’s books on an adult level. The plotline should be simple and sweet, ponies and mermaids or cars and whatever boys read about, but don’t be afraid to use big words and complex ideas. We’ll call it young adult transitional literature. Today’s third graders are your future audience, so why not write for them today? Give the children who are talented readers a reason to keep reading, a story to hold dear, and a way to be challenged again. You just may save a generation of readers.

-Hilary Hopkins

Hobbes End Publishing, LLC