It’s Okay, You Don’t Have to Hide Your Book

I started college four months after my seventeenth birthday. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but I still felt like I had “minor” stamped all over me, especially when someone at my freshman orientation decided it would be fun to find the youngest student among the new meat. Now, it didn’t occur to me to just make myself very small in my seat and pretend to be, say eighteen, like all the normal people, but then I didn’t think I would be the youngest person there, either. I figured, There’s got to be some twelve-year-old genius here. But nope, it was just me. My reward for being the youngest? A tiny tote bag with the university’s logo, a matching mouse pad, a pencil. And a renewed I’m-obviously-too-young-to-be-here complex. There was no way, no way at all, that I was going to let anyone see me reading Animorphs or The Chronicles of Narnia. Even away from school, I sneaked into the children’s section of Barnes and Noble, always with a ready excuse, you know, the I’m-babysitting-a-kid-who-would-like-this kind of thing.

I’m not sure at what point I actually made peace with my love of what literary agent Mary Kole calls “kidlit.” I do remember, however, rediscovering it at some point when I unearthed my copy of Louis Sachar’s There’s a Girl in the Boy’s Bathroom. I remembered liking the book when I first read it in the fifth grade, and I enjoyed it just as much years later. But it was one of the few kids’ books that I allowed myself to enjoy.

I’ve gone through phases in the types of books and authors I read. In middle school, it was anything and everything Agatha Christie, and I eventually graduated to Ngaio Marsh. In high school, I went through a huge Stephen King kick—so much so that my first email address was named for him. I still do enjoy Stephen King, but I think one of the main reasons I was so eager to read him was to prove that I didn’t need any of that kid stuff anymore.

Then the whole Harry Potter phenomena happened (not long before I was singled out as the youngest college freshman). For several years, I turned my nose up at the whole thing, slightly bewildered when I heard friends talking about the upcoming release of the first movie, even more surprised when my parents watched and enjoyed it.

That was more than ten years ago, though, and now that I am comfortably adult (and called “ma’am” too often for my comfort), I not only read children’s literature all the time, but I write it, too. I used to think that reading kids’ books meant that I was holding onto a part of my childhood, unable to move on, and that it would be shamefully obvious to everyone around me. As Mary Kole says in Writing Irresistible Kidlit:

In the ‘60s, ’70s, ’80s, and even the ’90s, the YA section of the bookstore was a very different place. There were some popular and candid stories like Go Ask Alice and the works of Judy Blume, but when most people thought of kidlit, they thought of mass market series like Sweet Valley High or The Babysitters Club or pulp horror from Christopher Pike…

Then came a wizard with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead: Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. Before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling hit the shelves in 1998, kidlit was happily broadcasting to the school and library market and wasn’t a major player… Harry Potter showed the world—and publishing executives—that children’s books could break out on a large scale, span audiences (children’s books ain’t just for kids anymore!), and bring in the big bucks, too.

Finally, Harry Potter made it not just permissible but cool to read kids’ books. When I finally stopped being an idiot and joined the wizarding throng in late 2002, I absolutely devoured the first four books. Sometime between my freshman and junior years, it had become cool to read the stuff that I’d tried to, but couldn’t ever, outgrow.

Before I graduated from college one year later, it seemed that most people sitting in the corridors, waiting for classes had one or another of J.K. Rowling’s famous books in their clutches. It was not only cool to read kid books, but it was uncool to be out of the loop. Over the next four-and-a-half years, there was a lot of impatient foot-tapping, along with many theorizing sessions with other Potter fans. And the great thing about reading Harry Potter was that someone would see me and say, “Oh, have you heard of Lemony Snickett?” Or one year, a friend gave me a bag full of adolescent lit for my birthday.

Children’s books have become so much more than “See Spot Run.” Yes, those books are out there, too, and they do have their place, like with kids learning to read. But there has to be something between Dr. Seuss and Charles Dickens. And those books have to be good, folks, or those kids will never want to read Dickens, or anything else, for that matter.

I admit that, in elementary school, I was the kid who pulled all my picture books off the shelf for my summer reading list (no one specified which books I was supposed to read, just that I fill my list with titles). That couldn’t last forever. At some point, I had to pick up the required reading and just suffer through it. Finally, my mom found just the right book to get me excited about reading, and after that, I plowed through my school’s library with a literary hunger. There are kids out there, reluctant readers like I used to be, who just need the right book to get them hooked. The wonderful news for them is that there are more choices than ever.

There is a whole new problem with this, however, one that my parents didn’t have to worry about but that I have to consider with my kids. Since children’s literature is now so popular, so accessible, and so fulfilling for readers of all ages, how many copies of Harry Potter am I going to have to buy to keep everyone in my family happy?