Happy Endings and Hope

05 Mar 1996
Perry Nodelman

In my children's fiction class last night, we had an interesting discussion about Eve Bunting's Smoky Night, Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat, and the amount of optimism and hopefulness that appear to be necessary before a children's book involving "difficult" subjects can get published. Would Smoky Night have been published if the boy's cat had died in the fire? If the Asiatic woman from the store across the street had been so justifiably upset about her livelihood being destroyed that she yelled and screamed rather than turning out to be nice and friendly after all? Would Weetzie still be a successful book if depression about AIDS did manage to destroy the idyllic love of Dirk and Duck, or if My Secret Agent Love Man had not been able to accept Weetzie's baby and took off for good? Is the focus on upbeat events emerging from difficulty and chaos a positive way of encouraging children and young people to be hopeful, or a dangerous insistence on not letting them in on the whole truth? Does a child's well-being depend on not knowing ugly possiblities, or on an author putting them in the best light? For that matter, does an adults'? Can or should young readers read about depressing outcomes of sad events as well as upbeat ones? What I found interesting in this discussion is that many of my students, who at this point in the course happily espouse the idea (my idea, passionately propagandized for) that children need to know about their world in all its painful aspects in order to become thoughtful, mature adults, still insist on the need for an optimistic view of painful or difficult aspects of life. Are they right? Does anybody have any thoughts about any of this?

Tue, 5 Mar 1996
Carol Leeson

Perry asks about the "optimism and hopefulness that appear to be necessary before a children's book involving difficult subjects can get published." I agree that children should have books that do not always show the happy or neat side of things. There are some out there. "The Faithful Elephants" are not saved at the last minute, but indeed die of starvation while their keepers watch. "Sadako" dies of cancer caused by the bomb. And more recently "Shin's Tricycle" tells the story of a 4 year old that is killed by that same bomb. It is interesting that the examples that I can come oup with off hand are all about World War II and that they all are true stories. Maybe someone els has some other examples. Sorry about the lack of authors, but I am drawing a blank right now and can't get to my catalog while I am logged into E-mail.

On Mar 5 Perry Nodelman wrote:
"Is the focus on upbeat events emerging from difficulty and chaos a positive way of encouraging children and young people to be hopeful, or a dangerous insistence on not letting them in on the whole truth? "

This reminds me of an article I read somwhere about an English prof attempting to teach a literature class at a prison only to find that a majority of the students dropped out because the texts (for adults) were too depressing. Comments were something along the lines of _I already know enough stories that end that way_, etc.

Can telling children that things WILL be hopeless at some point in their lives (as opposed to SEEMING hopeless) be a way of encouraging them to be hopeful? There's a Pollyana approach and then there's the other extreme; I'd advocate a middle ground, I think.

To better illustrate: a lady here in Muncie, IN has put our town's name on the map by getting herself liquored up to the point where shooting a callous off her foot (as opposed to merely hacking ay it w/ a razor, which is what she had been doing) seemed like an excellent idea. I, for one, am convinced that had someone read _Anne of Green Gables_ to her as a child, none of this would have ever happened.

My 5-yr-old daughter's cat died when she was 3; the event was not sugar-coated and she grieved for over a year, not daily, but by having him figure in her stories, pictures, and conversation. She knows that everyone dies; with any luck, I've told her, not till she's much older. I cite examples of _old_ family members whose parents are still alive. A month or so ago she burst into tears at the beginning of one of the Chincoteague books (_Misty of_, I think it was) when I told her, truthfully, that some of the horses did not survive the shipwreck. So I back-pedaled and told her they HAD made it to shore...it's just that the author was unaware of the fact.

She IS only 5.

"Does a child's well-being depend on not knowing ugly possiblities, or on an author putting them in the best light? For that matter, does an adults'?"

Personally speaking, my well-being depends heavily on the experiences I have had in the past whereby doors have closed but windows have opened. When the door slammed, not only were my fingers caught between it and the frame, so it seemed were three toes on each foot. (And I NEVER considered trying to shoot anything off.) Time, that wonderful warper of doors, worked its magic, and someone saw fit to shine a flashlight through the opening window so that I would be sure not to miss noticing that it was open.

When an author tells a story, where should s/he have it end -- with the slamming door, the flashlight in the window...or with the broken glass pane when the flashlight slipped?

I can spend days in a psychological funk after reading something dark and depressing (Cormac McCarthy's stuff affects me this way, as does Angela Carter's). Am I more sensitive than the average adult? Probably. (I only say this because there's this pea under my 12 mattresses that....) Am I more sensitive than the average child? Probably not. Ipso facto? May we safely conclude that depressing books have the power to depress children? Yes. Does that mean that they shouldn't read them? No.

I don't think that a single book has the power to depress a child to the point of danger, nor do I think that reading only happy endings will lead a child to believe that no other reality is possible. Life will take care of any such illusions in very short order. Coping skills, whatever they are and wherever we learn them from (books, family) are what determine how individuals will react to the adversity that is unavoidable in life. So don't give the kids happily ever afters, but do give them examples of silver linings, brighter sides, and dinners by candlelight that do not end in a four-alarm house fire.

"Can or should young readers read about depressing outcomes of sad events as well as upbeat ones? "

Yes, but not when they're 5, not to the exclusion of happy endings, not if there's a history of melancholy (or madness) (or callouses) in the family, and only after they've read _Anne of Green Gables_ repeatedly.

I think this is a very good point. Real life doesn't have endings, except for death.

Writers put them in. Where you end is a matter of choice.

All real love stories, for example, end in parting. But does that mean all book stories have to take the protagonists to where one of them dies?

When I was a kid, I hated unhappy, or even half-happy, endings. I wanted everyone to live happily ever after.

I'm a natural pessimist, though. Maybe an optimist needs more bringing down, and I needed more lifting up.

I've long wondered about truth vs. mental health. I think it's possible that we'd all be mentally healthier if we didn't know about the Holocaust and other acts of horror and cruelty.

If only bad things had happened in _Smoky Night_, Perry, you're right, it wouldn't have been published. But it wouldn't have been such a good book, either.

You could write a book about a child who is brought up by abusive parents and winds up killing a bunch of people and spending the rest of his/her life in prison, without ever understanding that s/he did anything wrong. It would be a true crime book. And no one could object, because truth is its own excuse. But if it were fiction, wouldn't the reader say, "Why?"

Too much coffee makes me talk too much.

Resa,
How beutifully written. And the setting of the reading of the book is critical. Who reads and listens with the child? What lights are in the child's real life? Who listens and watches for signals that a child's dead cat is still in the child's heart? What are we able to provide in the classroom?

Well, ALL my students complain that literature is too depressing, whether we are doing contemporary American fiction or Shakespeare. (I teach in a college). Realism to them, I think, is depressing, which is why so many of them like badly written sword and sorcery fantasy books.

Books with *unbelievable* happy endings are, in my opinion, just bad books. I don't see the Weetzie books as being unremittingly cheerful (anybody besides me read the new one yet, "Baby BeBop"? It made me weep, it's so beautifully written). FiFi dies, e.g., and BamBam is sick w. AIDS--the main characters do OK, but Witch Baby has a rough time of it in the succeeding books, etc. I think those books provide (within their admittedly somewhat fantastical world) a fairly realistic vision of life's complexities.

Or think of Voigt's books about Dicey. Generally they end OK, but always with the hint of further difficulties on the horizon. I do think, however, that publishers are loathe to publish anything too downbeat. Filmmakers are equally unwilling to give the public a downbeat ending. The Terminator films are pretty depressing, but we know that there is a hero in the future , even after the atomic holocaust. One of the reasons we read books and go to films is to enjoy the fantasy of things working out in the end. But if that's *all* any of us do--if none of us ever go to see "Leaving Las Vegas" or reads, oh, pick any sort of downbeat book, maybe "I Am The Cheese" or another of Cormeir's works, we'll all be poorer people, and maybe even less balanced than we currently seem to be (all those Republicans running for President seem to promise a happy ending, after all, and some of us might even believe them.)

In reply to Perry Nodelman's questions about positive endings for children in picture books I'd like to say we need both. But you know there are children out there that need to know that good things happen as none do at home. I had an abusive stepmother and I would have loved to have a book that pointed out a child telling another adult who helps get the child out oof the situation. It gives one hope and lots of children feel hopeless. As a kid I loved Cinderella and the Noodlehead stories whuich were just plain silly. I didn't dare say anything to anyone at school as to where I got my bruises. Such a book may not always be too realistic but we do need that stuff. Yes we need problem books but Curious Gearge and Amelia Bedelia are important too. Problems solved in a positive manner are also very necessary. I was a kid who believed I could do anything, understand anything if I Had it in a book to read. Indeed books were my security blanket. Well I had to say something.

Wed, 6 Mar 1996
Patrick Durusau (Carol in Georgia?)

Perry and everyone,

I think the reason there is demand for some positive outcomes from these books that deal with serious subjects is because children and young adults need to know that this is not the end of the story. Ther are positive things going on that may bring about a good outcome. In real life the story doesn't end until you are dead. Sometimes things are bad and it seems like there is no way to find any good in it whatsoever. But life goes on and good things do happen. If there are no positive threads in a book filled with despair young people may not learn to look for the positive signs and to have hope for tomorrow. I am the mother of a thirteen year old and know how easy it is for her to think that one awful thing that has happened has ruined her entire life. We have to learn to deal with the bad and run with the good. This is not clearly thought out I know but it is my first reaction to your question.

Perhaps you should have them read Corimier, especially AFTER THE FIRST DEATH. paterson's BRIDGE TO TERIBITHIA and THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS have endings about going on after the bad stuff happens, which is what life does. Or what about the incredibly ambigous ending of THE GIVER? GENTLEHANDS ends with the hero realizing the the grandfather he admired was a Nazi war criminal, hardly an upbeat note.

But it is true, most endings have some hope, because if we don't feel there is some reason to keep on in the face of evil and pain, then why write?Pain comes to us all sooner or later, and if it doesn't make you jump off a bridge, then you have to do something else.

If you don't have an upbeat ending you have Cormier. I rather like the middle ground between my 50s upbringing when children couldn't hear about painful, sad, and difficult subjects, and the view of many of my students that life is harsh and not likely to get better. For a kid many difficult situations (both serious and trivial) are the end of the world as they know it or a convenient excuse. The teacher in me wants some of their reading to point out that people do rise to challenges and overcome extreme adversity. To give them hope...

You might want to consider the _writers_ viewpoint. It must be very hard to put your characters in a hopeless situation and not give them anything--a ray of hope, an inner strength at the very least. I've noticed a tendency for writers of really depressing books to give them happier sequels--which are never as good as the original book, interestingly enough.

I think there's room in children's literature for all kinds of endings. In my personal experience, I really loved the security of upbeat books, yet I also appreciated the reality of books like _The Bear's House_, which could not possibly have ended happily (although it was one of the books that got a happier sequel.) Children--in fact, people--read fiction for many different reasons, which is why variety is so necessary. But everyone (myself included, of course) is always so eager to make up rules about what children's books should or shouldn't be like!

I think children have every right to feel sad or to be horrified by books, especially when the subject is sad or horrifying. Take _Alan and Naomi_, for example. I've cried buckets over it--and why not? It's about a horrible tragedy. And when I don't feel like facing tragedy, I've got the Oz books or the Melendys.

How, then, do you feel about the book _WAY HOME_ by Libby Hathorn? It is not until the end of the book that you realize Shane and his cat are homeless...and it ends at that point. To me this books was a bit jarring. But I like it. I don't feel "hopeless" at the end, yet I am confronted with the stark reality that for some kids this IS reality.

When my daughter was 13 she red Jenny Davis' _Sex Education_ and loved the book but hated the ending. When Jenny won the Pacific Northwest Library Association's Young Reader's Choice Award (Senior DIvision), daughter Katie got to meet her....and told her how much she hated the ending. Jenny's response was that she did too - but the characters who sat on her shoulder and directed the story would have it no other way.

Resa wrote: " So don't give the kids happily ever afters, but do give them examples of silver linings, brighter sides, and dinners by candlelight that do not end in a four-alarm house fire..."

This thread especially interests me because my all-time favorite book, They Loved to Laugh by Kathryn Worth, seems to fit the bill for "adversity doesn't ruin your life forever", and as far as I can tell from the author's forward, it's based on the life of a pair of her ancestors. The protagonist becomes an orphan (female without family nearby, early 1800s) at the age of 16, a couple years later suffers the death of a young man who loves her, adoptive family has money problems...but quietly finds happiness in the end.

Actually, I'm hoping to start another thread (not to end this one) with this message. I know of only one other person who has read this book (other than those to whom I have lent my copy), I think it's wonderful and have read it maybe 50 times since I was 8 years old, and I find myself wondering why it didn't become a "classic"--it was written in the 1940s--why has it not had the constant familiarity through the years of say A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which was written about the same time (for adults, a different audience I'll grant). My field is not English literature; I can't analyze a written work nearly as well as most of you (which is why I enjoy reading this list so much--I learn a great deal from you all!); how did/does this book not make the grade? I will admit that very occasionally the author sticks in a truly sappy phrase, but so very seldom that I don't think it detracts from the book as a whole.

Has ANYONE else read this book? (Do I really want to invite criticism of my favorite book??? Yeah, I really want to know.)

I DO recommend this book; last year I read it aloud to my daughter & husband; we cried over the sad parts, rejoiced over the loving family the protagonist became a part of, and some day I WILL get to that Carolina Historical Society mentioned in the sources in the forward, and find out what became of these long-dead people whose lives have touched me for 30 years.

Any takers?

"When my daughter was 13 she red Jenny Davis' _Sex Education_ and loved the book but hated the ending. When Jenny won the Pacific Northwest Library Association's Young Reader's Choice Award (Senior DIvision), daughter Katie got to meet her....and told her how much she hated the ending. Jenny's response was that she did too - but the characters who sat on her shoulder and directed the story would have it no other way.
Bette"

I have heard other authors say the very same thing about characters they have brought to life through their books. Some of the best characters have taken on a life of their own and follow a natural set of occurances that we can't may not allow everything tied up in a neat package for us.

If you really want to escape to a happy ending, there are dozens of series books that will end with a happy-ever-after, even carrying these stirling characters on in subsquent books. As someone else on the list pointed out, we can read the Oz books or the Little House books if we want good literature with happy endings. But sometimes it's books like "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" or "Rose Blanc" that really make us stop for a moment and take note of what's happening around us and what we have to be happy about. Children need a to see that there isn't always a solution to every problem that will end with good winning out over evil. It just ain't so. They also need books like "Face on a Milk Cartoon" that lets them put their own ending to a story that doesn't offer an easy solution.

I did a workshop on storytelling for preschool teachers and was told that they didn't like one of the stories I told because it was about death. The teachers felt that death was an inappropriate subject for preschoolers. I told them I felt that teaching children how to face death at an early age might make it easier in the long run to understand it when they have to face it at whatever age. After all isn't it the enemy we know easier to face than the one we don't?

Children most often face the lost of a pet before that of a parent. However, there was a first grader when I was student teaching that lost her mother. Her brother and she knew there mother was dying from cancer and lived with that idea for two years. The mother made her final departure a little easier for her children by talking about it and what would happen afterwards. I'm not saying it wasn't hard when the day finally came but the children understood and accepted her death with a grace that would have made her proud.

I heard author Ben Mikaelson speak last fall when he was in Nebraska to receive the 1995 Golden Sower Award for "Rescue Josh Maguire." Situations in his books do "work out" but he said he purposely doesn't tie up all the loose ends. For example, in "Stranded" Koby's parents are considering a divorce. You are left at the end wondering if they will be able to work out their differences or will split up. He said that he didn't want to end it with the parents getting back together and everyone living "happily ever after" because he knew there would be kids reading his book who were in a similar situation and he didn't want them to see themselves (or their parents) as failures if _they_ didn't get back together. Also, if the parents in the book divorced, kids reading the book who were in this situation would see no hope. In "Sparrow Hawk Red" we met the street children in Mexico and saw the kind of life they were living. He didn't bring the young girl to the US so she could live "happily ever after" because he thought that trivialized the problem. He wanted kids reading the book to be concerned about the problem--if her problems were solved, they could forget about the street children.

I hope this makes sense--it's late and my brain isn't functioning too well!

Jackie Ogburn writes: "But it is true, most endings have some hope, because if we don't feel there is some reason to keep on in the face of evil and pain, then why write? Pain comes to us all sooner or later, and if it doesn't make you jump off a bridge, then you have to do something else."

And someone else mentioned the tendency to all-or-nothing thinking of a 13 year old.

One of my favorite adult authors is James Tiptree Jr. I used to read her stories with the feeling, "A person can feel this--see the world this way--and still live," and it was very heartening.

Then Tiptree killed herself.

Kind of spoiled the stories for awhile.

The ending that has everything is to C.S. Lewis's _The Last Battle_. It has the only -completely- happy ending you could have: everyone dies and goes to heaven.

And I thought I was the only one who had read and loved "They Loved to Laugh" (and I thought that might have been partly because of my Quaker background) (-:

I have been giving this book to my thinking, caring sixth and seventh graders for years (probably about 15) and they have, almost without exception, loved it.

Yes, read it, love it, and let's talk about it.

No, you are not the only one who knows They Loved to Laugh. I remeember it fondly...but have not re-read it recently. We (KCPL) have it preserved in our HCLC (Historical Children's Literature Collection) This is a collection of Public Library books that have survived...in interest, as representative examples of their periods, were on Best lists, authors or illustrators of importance, etc. We have an un-interrupted history of 135 years of Children's Service...west of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Our Children's Director, Consultant, whatever the title, has been a contributor to the Children's Catalog-Wilson, forever. I can swear to 1960 on. In the 60's, we confronted the "weeding" problem by conservation. With 16 children's rooms, decent copies were available, and so the HCLC was born. Retired and active librarians make the decisions and gifts arrive, books go out of print and are suggested, so it grows in value and use. A proper catalog is "in the works" and all are included in our data base.

This is the long way 'round, but wanted you to know that Worth lives.mm

I have really been enjoying the thread on happy endings. I am working on a study of children's books with chronically ill characters, so it's been really interesting to follow this "happy endings" discussion through this lens.

I think a couple of really salient points have been raised. First of all, there needs to be hope. I couldn't stand What You Don't Know Can Kill You by Arrick because there was so little hope in the book. HIV is treated as an automatic and immediate death sentence. Conversely, Invincible Summer is about two teens with leukemia. The author (Ferris) does not sugar-coat the issue (one of these youngsters dies in the book), but there is still a chance for the other teenager, if she lives, to come to terms with her boyfriend's death and have an okay life. I thought Invincible Summer was fantastic.

This brings me to the second issue, which is really dealing with the issues head-on. I found Lurlene McDaniel's Six Month to Live annoying because it reads like a romance novel, except the main character happens to have leukemia. This character is remarkably unchanged by her leukemia. This seems so unrealistic to me. I wonder what any child or teenager would get from reading it. Perhaps my favorite book with a chronically ill main character is Waiting for Johnny Miracle by Alice Bach. I love the way Bach addresses issues that really come up for teens with cancer. For instance, one character in the book is determined not to die a virgin. Another favorite is Thin Air by Getz. While this is a very lighthearted and humorous look at asthma, the issues Getz addresses are real. The main character is trying to fit in and not be made different despite his severe asthma.

Another of my favorite books (although this one isn't about chronic illness) is Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher. This book deals explicitly with so many real-life issues: child abuse, hypocrisy, intolerance, bullying, abortion. Still, although it addresses all these heavy issues, the book is not at all hopeless. The characters rise to meet challenges with courage and integrity.

This email is getting incredibly long, so I'll stop now. If people have favorite books with chronically ill characters, I'd love to hear from you. (You can respond directly to me at saad@dolphin.upenn.edu.) Thanks.

Bonita, I agree with your statement. In fact, it has been "proven" by studies that depressed people are, on the whole, more realistic than "normal" or non-depressed people. Now, THAT'S a depressing thought! So, I have decided, quite consciously, that in certain cases it is far better to live in ignorance (ignorance IS bliss sometimes).

Thanks to everyone for all the interesting discussion of hope in relation to bleak or complex subjects. What's fascinated me about it all is the almost universal agreement to the idea that hope is essential in books for children, that unhappy endings deprive children of hope and are therefore dangerous to children's mental health or else are somehow counter-productive in some other way. At this point, my ideological-theorist antennas go up: if everyone finds this so easy to agree with, so obvious, then ideology must be at work: we've hit a point at which our values and convictions seem so perfectly natural, so incontrovertible, that we can only assume they're common sense--and can only talk about them as if they were. That's what Althusserian theory would suggest, at least. And I begin to wonder, then, if they are in fact so obvious, so clearly true, so right.

So why, then, might they not be? I have to think about that more. What I've come up with so far is just that I think a lot of children, even a lot of very young ones, know better. They know that you don't always win. That the cat sometimes dies. That the bullies sometimes get away with it. That your enemies don't always become your friends. And if the books children are reading (or the adults who talk to children about books) are presenting those always hopeful stories not as therapeutic wish-fulfilment fantasies but as the way things really are, then children know you're being lied to. They begin to worry about the hypocrisy of adults. They begin to wonder why adults don't want them to notice some of the bleaker aspects of bleak things. Are they hiding their own inadequacies, failings, weaknesses? Are they just protecting themselves? Are they really afraid of bad things themselves, and not able to face up to them? Do they really deserve a child's trust?

A second point. I'm all for hope. I am myself a hopeful person. I believe absolutely in the wonderful potential of people to transcend pain, to be better than we are, to live by ideals, etc., etc. But I have those convictions in the face of everything I know about human weakness, evil, failure, cruelty. And I know a lot. If I based my hopefulness on not knowing all that ugly stuff, I'd be lying to myself--it'd be a false and too easily won optimism--and an optimism, I believe, likely to disintegrate in the face of real painful knowledge of the real ugly possibilities. And if that's true for me, why shouldn't I believe it's equally true of other human beings, including children?

Our insistence on focusing in books for children on the optimistic elements of bad situations seems to me to represent our own inability as adults to accept and deal with and get past the uglier aspects of things. It seems to represents our unacknowledged conviction that reality as it is in its complete truthful state is, basically, ugly and depressing, and not really a source of optimism at all. Optimism, depends on not knowing, it seems.

I don't share that opinion. Knowing about painful deaths and awful diseases and ugly immoral behaviour doesn't deprive me of hope--it grounds my hope in a knowledge of the real situation, and allow me to think realistically about how to get my way through bad situations without becoming hopeless about them. I don't see why knowledge should deprive children of hope either.

I'm not, incidentally, asking for unremittingly bleak books that suggest nothing good is ever possible. I'm asking for books that point out all the awful possibilities as well as the happy ones, and base their optimism on complete reporting of the whole truth and not just on a deceptively illusory partial truth.

And by the way, since they've been brought up a number of times. I personally think that a number of Cormier's books do have happy endings, in terms of characters getting past a number of falsely optimistic delusions about themselves and the morality of their own behaviour and gaining a truly useful wisdom of the subtleties of moral confusion in a confusing world. In giving their characters knowledge of their own involvement in human corruption, a knowledge that will govern their later actions and make them more morally sensitive and more intelligent about the consequences of their actions, these books offer real hope, not false optimism. But we discussed this on Childlit sometime last spring, I think--no point in repeating that discussion.

When I was in the classroom, one of my favorite books to teach was Cynthia Rylant's A BLUE-EYED DAISY. Ellie's father was an lcoholic, yet despite his near death due to a car accident while he was under the influence, the book still manages to end on a hopeful note. The dad isn't "cured" by the end, but he showns signs of wanting to reform.

How I wish I had had a book like this when I was growing up. Like Ellie, my father was an alcoholic but it was *never* discussed. In fact, I never was able to give his "problem" a name until I was well into my twenties.

Whenever thisngs got tense at home, I fled to my favorite refuge, the town library where I loaded up with books that took me to other times and places. None of those books had characters with families like mine though, so I regarded them with curiosity and envy.

I din't meet Ellie and her folks until I was nearly 40 but recognized her immediately as my soulmate - the one I would have loved to have known when I was thirteen.

Sad to say, my own father died of a massive coronary a couple of years ago - a drinker to the bitter end.

Still - I always clung to that hope that Ellie had...maybe someday.

I agree with Perry Nodelman that Cormier can be hopeful. At the end of *I Am the Cheese*, when Adam gets back on that bike and starts to pedal again...I can weep just thinking about his courage, with such overwhelming odds and enormous power arrayed against him. Many times during our bitter and protracted local battle with the censors who found this book bleak and depressing, I read and reread the ending and found great hope there. Which goes to prove, as we've known for some time, that readers make their own meanings. Just as repressive censors find smut wherever they look, so do generally hopeful people create their own optimism.

I know that it's dangerous to extrapolate from adult experience and draw conclusions about children's reading, but the books that make the biggest spaces in my heart are those that don't offer rosy views or easy solutions. Some of them have been named here already -- *Faithful Elephants*, *Rose Blanche*, and *Sadako*. John Marsden's *Letters from the Inside* is another one I keep coming back to again and again.

Later this afternoon I have a workshop with fifth graders. As a result of this discussion, I plan to read *Rose Blanche* to them and record their responses. I'll let you know what happens.

Wendy says that there's room for all kinds of endings in children's literature, and Bette says that the characters can dictate the ending to the author. I think what they're alluding to and what we need to be sure to look at here is *good literature*. I know this is inevitably going to bring up value judgments (what *is* good literature; who decides? etc.). And to that, all I can say is, like the judge and pornography, I know it when I see it (how's that for subjective?).

Since Perry's original question asks also about whether adult books should contain happy endings or not, I'd like to illustrate what I mean with two of my very favorite books (these are desert island books, right after Shakespeare and the Bible). One is _Native Son_, by Richard Wright, a book I was literally unable to put down until I finished it, and a book that is pretty dang hopeless (excuse the Mississippianism). The other is _Their Eyes Were Watching God_, by Zora Neale Hurston, a book that, although some sad events happen in the course of it, ends on a very positive, hopeful note. Compare the last lines of each:

"Good-bye!"

He still held on to the bars. Then he smiled a faint, wry, bitter smile. He heard the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut. (Native Son)

The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. (TEWWG)

Yet these are two favorites? What do they have in common? Powerful prose, passionate story. Now, I wouldn't go recommending _Native Son_ to someone whose daughter was just murdered and put in a furnace :-), or, for that matter, I wouldn't recommend TEWWG to someone who's just gone through a bitter divorce. Or at least not *at that point* in their lives. But, in general, I would recommend these to anyone I could get to listen to me!

So, if we choose books for children on the basis of their literary quality, there are sure to be books of both types (hopeful and hopeless), and, as Wendy points out, all endings. I think kids can handle all kinds and should be able to try.

"I have really been enjoying the thread on happy endings. I am working on a study of children's books with chronically ill characters, so it's been really interesting to follow this "happy endings" discussion through this lens."

Have you noticed more of these kinds of books lately (last couple decades)? Just wondering. Sounds like an interesting topic.

What about "The Trail on Which They Wept" about the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee being herded out west (which my daughter had the other day and now I can't find to provide the author's name). Another one is "The Burnt Stick" about an aboriginal child of mixd parentage who was taken away from his mother and brought up in a white institution "for his own good".

On Wed, 6 Mar 1996, Isaacs wrote:
"If you don't have an upbeat ending you have Cormier."

Yes, exactly. And don't kids love Robert Cormier's books? Adults cringe, but there is something in his books that reaches kids. The honesty, perhaps?

I think often of the scene in *Beyond the Chocolate War* in which David Caroni kills himself by jumping off a bridge. He realized with horror, after he has already jumped and there is no way to stop, that he didn't want to die: "Trying frantically to hold on, grab something, not fall but, yes, he was falling, loosened from the bridge, wrong, a mistake, I didn't mean to do this...."

Horrible, yes. But what a powerful message to choose life, even in the midst of dispair. And isn't it important for kids to be able to look at such things from the safety of their bedrooms rather than as David Caroni did, when it was too late?

There are many for whom childhood is a joyful time. But for others it is painful and filled with dispair. Those kids aren't going to believe the happy endings. Cormier's books speak to their reality. I believe that's important.

And, I think it's important for kids--and adults--who live relatively safe, comfortable lives, to see the other side, if for no other reason than to broaden their awareness of the human condition.

An adult book I read recently comes to mind: *Billy,* by Albert French. It is the story of a 10 year old black boy in the thirtys or forty's South who is executed for the murder of a white girl. No happy ending there, but one of the most powerful books I've ever read.

So I guess I'm one who disagrees that books must have a happy ending--especially at the YA level. (This from a person who's great aunt's credo was: There's enough misery in the real world without my having to read about it!)

There are two books that are fascinating to read as a pair: _Charlotte's Web_ and Palmer Brown's _Hickory_ (1978). Hickory is a dark palimpsest of CW, and together these two books explore many subtle and affecting nuances of the emotions and philosophical stances radiating from the two words in my subject line. Like CW, Hickory tells a story about friendship, death, and life. Hickory, a mouse, saves the life of a grasshopper named Hope (Hop for short) but is ultimately powerless to stop the inexorable flow of time, the seasons, nature, and death. The final scene, in which Hickory sets out with Hope on a doomed last journey towards warmer climates is a tableau of despair backlit with the memory of hope. Like CW, too, it is gorgeously written--full of poetry, music, comedy, and pathos. Interestingly, 2 of Mr. Brown's earlier works are fantasies written in the tradition of the ultimate work of despair, Alice in Wonderland--but Brown's "take" on AW is lighter--more hopeful. I have often wondered what happened to this remarkable writer / illustrator in the 15 or so years between _Beyond the Paw Paw Trees_ and _Hickory_ to turn him from a light interpreter of fantastic traditions to a dark one.

This discussion brings to mind thoughts on the gang movements so prevalent today in some of our cities. I have often read and heard discussed that these children have no hope for the future; feel their lives will not last long; believe they have no reason to act positively because their lives will soon end anyway so they may as well grab what they will. This attitude is a frightening one for it allows children to kill without thought; to walk into a MacDonalds and shoot anyone in their path; to rob and maim without remorse. I would not wish to see our literature only reflect this doom for that may encourage such behavior to spread. Yet, reality, one which illuminates a desire for future, which depicts natural consequences while providing for an understanding of alternative choices would appear beneficial. Where do these thoughts lead? I guess to a variety of reading endings. But with a realization that children do need to see some hope in life's future.

To quote from one of the criteria for the annual list of recommended books for children published by The Child Study Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College: "...children's reading should contribute to their understanding of themselves and their world, according to their readiness, at different ages, to deal with their own feelings and to cope with the destructive forces in the world." Books which do not offer hope of any kind are not deemed appropriate for the list.

This is not about endings, but about books in general. I've noticed people saying how they wished they had had such-and-such a book in childhood, because the problems in it were similar to their own.

Now, I didn't have capital-P Problems in childhood. I had lowercase problems--shyness, etc. And the only kinds of Problems I liked to read about were loving-familiy-in-poverty things, like the Moffats, All-of-a-kind Family, Five Little Peppers. Cozy.

(I still like a nice cozy murder.)

Of course, in the fifties, we didn't have much choice.

I would have guessed that kids with unhappy homes would want fantasy and sf, not books about themselves, but obviously I'm wrong. Or is it a matter of personality variation?

I don't know what I'm asking here, exactly, but I'd like to know, I guess, what kind of influence the type of home you came from had on your reading. For many of us, choosing library books was one of our earliest exercises of independent choice. How was that choice exercised?

In response to the discussion initiated by Perry Nodelman, yesterday I read *Faithful Elephants* and *Rose Blanche* aloud to a group of fifth graders and recorded their responses. Before I give the highlights, a little context...this is a private workshop, meeting in my home. We're in the guest-room-converted-into-library. Two of the walls are lined with books, and there are big floor pillows (and popcorn and brownie crumbs) everywhere. Most of the children (six of them) have been reading, writing, and talking with each other since early last summer.

Because I was tape-recording our session, and because the reading necessitated a change in the plans the children had already made for our session, I explained that I was going to read two books to the group and study their responses.

We started with *Faithful Elephants*. By the fifth page, J. spoke up: "You know you said you were going to ask us about our opinions? I think that it's very inspiring...it's a very serious book. If somebody like the guy who wrote that part at the beginning shared the book with soldiers and stuff, the soldiers would become inspired by it..and maybe the wars would stop."

H.: "You know that part where he wouldn't eat the poisoned potatoes, that shows ELEPHANTS ARE NOT STUPID."

K: "They could ship the animals to some place higher in the country where they aren't having bombs or wars because if we had that kind of species today we'd probably learn something from them." (She had earlier made the point that some of these animals in the zoo might be rare ones. This was also before the point in the book that the other zoo option is brought up and rejected.)

J: "Buying and selling slaves is a type of war and if they were buying and selling slaves somebody could mention that book...the slave-catchers...it would be almost proper for them to read that book." (Something unintelligible about Harriet Tubman follows.)

This launched a flurry of comments about racism.

At times as I continued reading, there were audible gasps, and comments such as "Oh my god I can't believe it."

J: "Can animals get anorexia?"

As I finished reading, the room was silent for a few seconds. Then J. said how hard it would be to watch someone die, and they launched into talk about who had seen a dead person.

Then K. brought us back to the book with her insistence that they should "send them to that zoo up there...there's a slim chance there'd be a war there and in Tokyo -- too hard to coordinate."

Then we went on to *Rose Blanche*. The talk here started even before I read the first page.

H: "I think this is going to be in New Yok."

B: "No, I see that Nazi sign. It's Germany."

H: "When was Hitler? My family's half Jewish." Then she talks about another book called *Jacob's Rescue*.

Later in the book when Rose Blanche takes food to the people in the camp, this talk followed:

J: "How come she didn't get thrown thirty or forty feet? Hot barbed wire is high voltage."

Someone explained that she just put her hand through the wire.

J: "But she said, 'The barbed wire stopped me.'"

B: "Oh, that just means she could walk no further."

Shortly after that R. exclaimed, "How come it's third person now when it started off in first?"

After I confessed that I had never noticed that before, R. said smugly, "That just shows you don't always pay attention when you read."

As we were looking at one of the camp illustrations, something wonderful happened. Spontaneously, the children on the other side of the room got up and moved into a tight semi-circle around me and the book. I continued reading, and then J. spoke up as I turned a page" "Can I read?" Then the children took over and finished reading the book aloud for themselves.

The tape ran out before we finished the book, but after reading both books I told them briefly about the discussion here, and they were unanimous in their belief that children should read books with all kinds of endings.

I too return over and over to certain books that in some way renew me each time I revisit them. As a longtime English teacher of course I reread (and loved) the books I taught (or taught certain books because I liked rereading them). My library is filled with ragged and ruined books read well beyond their binding's endurance.

But rereading books has taken on a new aspect for me recently. I've been reading to my 83-yr-old father as he slowly recovers from a serious illness. In the past three years we've read more than 60 books together--classics (Dickens--8 novels, Steinbeck, Conan Doyle, Galsworthy), best-sellers (Grafton, LeCarre), history/fantasy _The Once and Future King_, _The Mammoth Hunters_), mysteries (Grafton, Perry), contemporary (_Moo_ by Jane Smiley).

Many of these books were new for both of us, but a fair numberwere ones I had loved and thought he might enjoy. We're currently in the middle of Volume 1 of Tolkien's _ Lord of the Rings_, my 6th or 7th trip through that trilogy, but his first--and so far he loves it. I'm finding that rereading old favorites ALOUD, often with decades intervening between the last time I read them, makes each book seem very new. (Incidentally, I am for the first time noticing how politically conservative and sexist Tolkien is...)

Here's a commentary about this issue that I found in a magazine:

"Turning Back to the Classics"

Robertson Davies urges us to turn, and turn again, to the great books we first encountered in our youth, in this excerpt from a talk included in _The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: Volume 13_, 1992, edited by Grethe B. Peterson (University of Utah).

"The great sin ... is to assume that something that has been read once has been read forever. As a very simple example I mention Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_. People are expected to read it during their university years. But you are mistaken if you think you read Thackeray's book then; you read a lesser book of your own. It should be read again when you are 36, which is the age of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be read for a third time when you are 56, 66, 76, in order to see how Thackeray's irony stands up to your own experience of life. Perhaps you will not read every page in these later years, but you really should take another look at a great book, in order to find out how great it is, or how great it has remained, to you. You see, Thackeray was an artist, and artists deserve this kind of careful observation. We must not gobble their work, like chocolates or olives, or anchovies, and think we know it forever. NOBODY EVER READS THE SAME BOOK TWICE."

yea Bonnie also i had no major problems in childhood and that independence of selecting books in the schoola nd public library was wonderful. Luckily no one ever tried to censor my choices and I could read anything. Perhaps if more children were encouraged to have the opportunity to make decisions independently those who need various escapes or outlets could find satisfaction in libraries.

Bonita,

My childhood was, for the most part, unhappy. Lots of fights and violence in the home. I, for one, enjoyed reading about strong characters who overcame difficult problems. They made me feel hopeful. They made me feel more normal. They felt less alone. They made me realize that one could have problems, an unhappy beginning to life, and yet still be successful and happy in oneself and in adulthood. These books were truly my salvation. As fighting was going on around me, I'd hide in my closet and read, read, read. Sure I read fantasy and animal stories as well (finished Dr. Dolittle in one reading in that closet) but I tended to read a lot of problem novels. I'm not sure I realized on a conscious level what these books were doing for me until years later when I could look back on my situation somewhat objectively. Just my $2 worth.

. . . just musing about Perry's and Katie's recent posts about different kinds of books, with different kinds of "endings." It strikes me that we're talking in a larger sense not just about types of books, but about the *reasons* we read books -- and that there are a lot of those!

Sometimes we read for good feelings (and doesn't it just FEEL GOOD when a bully gets what's coming!) and sometimes we want to learn about people and situations; sometimes we want to escape reality and sometimes we need to face it square.

I'm glad that there are lots of different kinds of books with different "takes" on the world and its people!

P.S. So, what IS it with Robert Cormier, anyway? Actually, a good example of a book with horrible happy hopeful ending (and ambiguous, too) is his _The Bumblebee Flies Anyway_. . .

I just wanted to add to that last post...

I also have always loved mysteries... maybe it is also that element of problem-solving mixed with another element (humor, suspense, etc.)

Bonita wrote:
I would have guessed that kids with unhappy homes would want fantasy and sf, not books about themselves, but obviously I'm wrong. Or is it a matter of personality variation?

I don't think there's an easy answer to this question. As I said earlier, there are many reasons why people read. Books helped *me* through a very bad childhood-- all kinds of books - happy family books, fantasy, and problem-oriented. If there was one thing they all had in common it was...how can I put this....they helped me to make sense of the world. It was less a matter of whether or not they were optimistic or pessimistic, happy or unhappy - what mattered was that they were *good* - by which I mean, moral. That they showed me a world in which good and evil were defined and important. That was probably the single most terrible deficiency of my childhood, a moral base...books helped me find one.

I'm sorting this out as I write it, but I think this, for me, is really the answer to the happy/unhappy controversy. If there's any kind of book children shouldn't read, it's not one which ends without hope--it's one which distorts good and evil and makes the world seem even more confused and twisted than it already is. (I'm speaking here as a critic, not a censor.) I know this will open up a whole other bag of worms about what is good and what is evil - but I think, at heart, we know, and that's why kids continue to love the same books through generation after generation.

On Fri, 8 Mar 1996, Thomas B Smith wrote:
"It strikes me that we're talking in a larger sense not just about types of books, but about the *reasons* we read books -- and that there are a lot of those!

Sometimes we read for good feelings (and doesn't it just FEEL GOOD when a bully gets what's coming!) and sometimes we want to learn about people and situations; sometimes we want to escape reality and sometimes we need to face it square. I'm glad that there are lots of different kinds of books with different "takes" on the world and its people!"

Amen, Tom!

"P.S. So, what IS it with Robert Cormier, anyway? Actually, a good example of a book with horrible happy hopeful ending (and ambiguous, too) is his _The Bumblebee Flies Anyway_. . ."

It has also struck me that excellent, but bleak, books are often impossible to find. Since Cormier came up, I asked Chris Saad, who is working on books about chronically ill children, what she thought of "The Bumblebee Flies Anyway," and she told me that she'd had to get it on interlibrary loan because the Philadelphia public library didn't have any copies. I was dismayed. But, I found the same thing in trying locate a copy of Garner's Red Shift -- a book that can speak best, perhaps, to the very people who read least and need books most -- there were no copies in the Albuquerque Public Library. These are both incredible books, and I suspect that it is at least partly because the adults who are the intermediaries between books and children don't think these grim tales are suitable for children, that they are so little known.

Sure, hope is important, but I think people (including children) need to see themselves in books, and that finding realistic depictions of horrible situations hasn't been easy to do in children's books. Seems to me I was pretty old -- like high school? -- before I could comprehend why anyone would want a sad ending in a book. But, I also found almost no books that presented a life that was very close to the reality of my own. I suspect I internalized a couple of things, (1) Somehow my life fell short because it was left out of books, and (2) That the books I read not only depicted life the way it was supposed to be, but that they were what BOOKS were supposed to be. And I suspect a lot of people haven't outgrown this view.

In terms of books that leave us with no hope -- why should one book have to provide all the answers? Sometimes discussing the hopeless book forces us to come up with hope ourselves. Gulliver's Travels, anyone? What depresses me is not the "hopeless" books, but the fact that they are so challenged and censored that we can't even get hold of them.

Good point, Wendy. Making sense of the world and determining what is right/wrong good/evil.... I like that. Books did/do that for me too. If you can't understand your own reality (as many abused/unhappy/unwanted children cannot do) it is wonderful to see a print world that makes sense. It gives one hope that this kind of comprehensible world can exist; that things can be put into some kind of order.

Often when children in a literature discussion group have read two or three chapters of a new book, I ask them to think about the central conflict in the story and make predictions about the outcome. Often someone says, "But you know there's going to be a happy ending." When asked about the reason for the prediction, the child usually replies somewhat cynically, "Everything in books always comes out right in the end." Following comments like this, we've had numerous discussions about story structure which have included statements like, "We're only in chapter two. You know the main character isn't going to die. What would the rest of the book be about?" In other words, these sixth graders understand that authors shape stories into a relatively predictable form.

Yesterday in an early discussion of The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall, the students were thinking about possible outcomes to the book, and the happy ending comment was made again. Thinking about this discussion, I asked them whether they felt the endings of books should always be happy. To a child, they all shook their heads, and one of them said, "But they shouldn't all be unhappy either. Things in life aren't all one way. Sometimes they're happy, and sometimes they're sad. Books should be that way too."

Earlier this year a group read Shabanu by Suzanne Staples, a book which they loved. However, they were greatly bothered by the ending because so wanted Shabanu to have a way out of what they saw as a terrible future. They recognized that what she was doing was impossible, but they wanted her to be able to escape. And of course, the beating given to her by her father was terribly upsetting to them. In this case they wanted a hopeful ending, but they knew it wasn't realistic. It's clear to me that they understood that life is sometimes unfair.

Another child brought in a copy of Night by Elie Wiesel. I told him I thought it was a difficult and painful book, but he wanted to read it. In the discussions I had with him about the book he expressed his horror at the events of the story. His responses were thoughtful and sensitive, but in the end he chose not to read Dawn by Wiesel as his next book. He said he didn't want to read about anything so horrible right now. He didn't regret reading Night, but he had had enough.

I think we can't protect older children from reality, and it seems to me that literature provides a place for them to begin to explore their thoughts and feelings about painful issues. But it is helpful if they have others with whom they can talk about their reading. And we need to know when enough is enough.

This thread of Perry's about happy and unhappy endings, hope, and reality in children's lit brings to mind a favourite book of mine. Joseph Gold's _Read For Your Life_ is about the therapeutic nature of reading.

From the back cover:
"Both a self-help book and a testimonial to literature, _Read Your Life_ is a popular, even populist book - energetic, colloquial, anecdotal, confessional, at times apocalyptic...."

"Dr. Gold knows deeply the therapeutic effects of reading and, in this notably accessible book, leads us gently to the conclusion that to live in books is not an escape but the way to a full understanding of life." - George Woodcock"

My feeling is that most booklovers (either consciously or unconsciously) share this philosophy of reading as an intensely meaningful form of therapy . And those who love children want to offer them some pointers about how to survive in life. Those who love both books and children try to do both - they point out books that have been personally therapeutic. I think that is where a lot of people in the thread are coming from. I do agree, Perry, that we don't need to hide horrible truths from children and I assert we do need a wide range of happy and unhappy, hopeful and hopeless stories. At the same time, I remember hiding _The Diary of Anne Frank_ in the linen cupboard in an attempt to escape her peering gaze from the cover shot, hoping vainly that I could forget what I had just discovered about evil and sleep through the night. But that book was a life-changing experience for me. I think reading it was an awakening from childhood into adulthood. And after I'd read it, I wished I could go back. So I read a bunch of hopeful happy stuff (all of L.M. Montgomery's novels) until I was ready to face dark reality again. (As a side note, boy, was I shocked when I read Montgomery's depressing diaries recently!)

Anyway, I'm sure I'm babbling. It's just so much more fun to write this than report cards!

When I read Smoky Night to my 3rd graders at a low-income inner-city school, many of them related to the idea of a stressful situation making friends of neighbors. Had stories about a neighborhood shooting, a fire - neighbors on the street communicating. They really like the story and the art.

In a message dated 96-03-08 05:34:56 EST, Bonita writes:

"I don't know what I'm asking here, exactly, but I'd like to know, I guess, what kind of influence the type of home you came from had on your reading. For many of us, choosing library books was one of our earliest exercises of independent choice. How was that choice exercised?"

I believe the old adage that as children we read to find ourselves and as adults we read to escape from ourselves. Millions of 4th, 5th and 6th graders love to read books about the lives and times of 4th, 5th and 6th graders, whether by Louis Sachar, Barthe DeClements or Ann Martin. It is a rare adult who reads fiction about people who work in the same jobs and do the same things as themselves.

As a teenager I remember reading novels with an eye out for someone who thought like me, who shared my point of view--someone who gave me validation and permission to be myself because I was not the only one who felt this way. I have discussed this dynamic with my peers and with hundreds of teens, and the only difference between my 70's adolescence and that of today's teens seems to be the need many 12 to 15 year olds have to "escape" from there own lives--something that didn't hit readers of my generation until we were 15 to 18.

I was a self-directed reader from a very early age and my mother and my teachers rarely tried to steer me towards a particular book because I so clearly knew what it was I wanted. Even the librarians I remember stayed out of my way, usually only commenting on my voracious appetite. My high school librarian allowed me access to a pile of books she could not put out on the shelves (Brautigan, Vonnegut and Ferlinghetti were all introduced to me in this fashion) because she knew I had outgrown her collection and she wanted to keep me reading.

My mother never interfered with my reading choices (except my comic books, which she threw out--not because she dissaproved but because they cluttered up the house and I refused to pick them up) and when I was 9 and I insisted on reading the Warren Commision Report, _The Caine Mutiny_ and some non-fiction bestseller about UFO's, she let me. I am very fond of an anecdote about her finding me reading _Coffee, Tea or Me_ when I was 11 and the incredible good sense she had not to raise a ruckus but to let me find out that I wasn't ready for it myself. I was a child of divorce and my mother was a single mom, and I remember our situation was unusual, if not rare, and I distinctly remember looking in the library for books about kids who had my situation and not finding them until I was 12 (1970).

One of the things we don't seem to give enough credit to young adults for is their solid ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is fiction. Whether the "unhappy" aspect of a novel is its level of violence, its bleak and/or unresolved ending or a certain nihilism, the reader can make the distinction. They have to, if only as a survival technique. An eleven year old cannot control most of the bad things that go on in his/her life; an uncle dying of AIDS, parents who fight or drink or both, gang violence in the neighborhood. But, they by golly can read a book that commands a strong response of them and THEY can decide the emotion to have. They can stare into the abyss and decide NOT to be afraid because "this isn't real and I can control this." To me, that is the essence of why reading for pleasure is crucial to the building of self esteem. Power over your own emotions.

I could go on, but I have sort of strayed from the topic. I lurked through the discussion that Perry brought up of happy endings and a lot of these thoughts have been swimming around my head for awhile.

Reply to message from WMMayes@aol.com of Sat, 09 Mar
"One of the things we don't seem to give enough credit to young adults for is their solid ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is fiction. Whether the "unhappy" aspect of a novel is its level of violence, its bleak and/or unresolved ending or a certain nihilism, the reader can make the distinction...." (Long quote snipped -- f-r.)

Walter, I'm fifty and I can't do this yet. Once an image gets in my head, it's there, and it takes years, sometimes, even for the emotional power to leach out of it. And then, the image remains.

I'm saying "image", but I don't, usually, mean a visual image. I'm not big on them. A tactile one is usually the worst--I cannot -bear- to read about pain and mutilation.

Who was talking about the book with the hands cut off and dropped in the wife's lap? I wouldn't read that to a class, because I couldn't bear it myself.

So, am I weird? Or do we all just have to know ourselves and help our children to know themselves, so we can choose what fits?

I would like to thank Perry for writing more at length on Thu, 07 Mar 1996 re _hope in relation to bleak or complex subjects_, and especially the part about "if everyone finds this so easy to agree with, so obvious, then ideology must be at work: we've hit a point at which our values and convictions seem so perfectly natural, so incontrovertible, that we can only assume they're common sense--and can only talk about them as if they were. That's what Althusserian theory would suggest, at least."

This reminds me of the contrarian stock market prediction theory: to wit, as soon as _Time_ and/or _Newsweek_ see fit to do a cover story on the bull (or bear) market, some inexplicable force takes over and sends the market in a direction completely opposite to what the entire country was convinced a mere 15 minutes ago was the way things were going to go for the next 16 months.

That said, I now find myself in the position of having to make way for the character in my head who's insisting on having her say...

Oh, splendid. My eyes are still tearing from the month-long windy ride I just took on a stallion called Censorship, (Is he dead? No, just resting. We can all resume beating him as soon as we and he have recovered from our stupid wounds) and now I find myself careering around a football field on the back of a goat named Althusser (middle name No Hope) who's gone mad from eating pokeweed and is about to trample, tromple and stample a bunch of innocent little children.

(I think all of Childlit may have been gathered on the football field to film a commercial about how the study of children's literature and the purchase of a particular brand of shampoo was all that we needed to get thru life, but that's another story.)

So, Althusser's out of control and my HOPING that he'll stop before any irreparable damage is done is not working. Since this is my version of events, it's time to try some coping skills.

I whisper in his ear, "Stop this madness." Nothing happens.

I bite his ear. This only makes him go faster.

I appeal to his inner kid. The crowd moans.

Fortunately, Fabio (of Romance novel covers fame) happens to be on the set and as Althusser and I head for the 10-yard line, a trail of bloody babies in our wake, he (Fabio) tosses me a hypodermic syringe. I hearken back to the words of my mother, the circus elephant rider, lean back, take aim, and plunge the needle into Althusser's left hindquarter. This stops the goat dead in his tracks, which sends me flying over his head, breaking my leg (but not my neck) in the process.

The rest of you help gather up the bodies, none of which are dead. (This is not for the children's sake, but rather for the sake of the parents. When a child dies, too many parents never recover and I'll have none of that in MY story.) There are some broken bones, a few bruises, and one child who will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair tapping out messages to Childlit w/ a stick taped to his forehead. But that's as far as I'll go.

(And to anyone who disagrees w/ me about the dead children, may I gently invite you to form your own list, perhaps to be called DeadkidLit? Majordomo, I believe, would welcome such a group w/ open arms; he seems to have very compatible tendencies.)

As for this part of Perry's note:
"They [children] begin to worry about the hypocrisy of adults. They begin to >wonder why adults don't want them to notice some of the bleaker aspects of bleak things. Are they hiding their own inadequacies, failings, weaknesses? Are they just protecting themselves? Are they really afraid of bad things themselves, and not able to face up to them? Do they really deserve a child's trust?"

Good point(s).

I'm not sure if this fits in, but the advice of my mother (no, not the elephant rider, my other mother) that rankles to this day is _Be the better person_. This was usually in response to my whining complaint that Sibling A had just done something dastardly and I wanted, nay demanded, retribution or restitution or at the very least some reconstituted orange juice. None of which were allowed, (orange juice was too expensive, all we were allowed was water and the occasional glass of Kool-Aid) and instead of which I was fed the aforementioned pap...which seems to my mind to qualify for inclusion in Perry's category of Hypocrisy.

Admonishments to _hope for the best_ or _take the high road_ somehow did not get it when what I really wanted was permission to punch my brother in the nose.

So what SHOULD my mother have done? That's a topic I prefer not to tackle. As a child, this is where I'd go hide under the bed and read a book about other people's mothers.

As for what I do now that I'm a mother, I find myself meting out...not hypocrisy, or at least not that I can think of (or will admit to) at this moment...but messages of other kinds, some of which are born of my need to comfort and keep safe, some of which fly on the wings of anger. My daughter does not yet question the things I tell her to dry her tears, but she does question the things I say in anger. I can only hope that when the time comes for her to begin doubting the words meant to soothe, the ability to question will stand her in good stead. And if she does ask, I can only hope (it's funny how that word keeps cropping up, isn't it?) that she will accept my answer that I told her the horses did not die, not because I'm a hypocrite, but because I didn't want her to be hurt until she was ready for it.

Very thin ice here, I know, I can feel it cracking even as I write.

I wonder if reminding her of the day I saved her from the crazed goat...

Best to jump onto the next floe over.

"Our insistence on focusing in books for children on the optimistic elements of bad situations seems to me to represent our own inability as adults to accept and deal with and get past the uglier aspects of things."

I don't follow here. How does focusing on an optimistic element represent an inability to get past uglier aspects? Seems to me you get past the uglier aspects by looking them square in the face, grieving about them for as long as you and your endocrine glands find necessary, and then moving onto something more conducive to warm heart cockles.

Might it be a timing thing? There is a middle step there; you don't tell children to skip over the _square in the face_ phase and isn't part of good parenting about teaching kids the skills necessary to make it thru that middle step, not necessarily unscathed, but with some core part of their beings tempered but intact?

Well, it's Saturday, 9:20AM, the weekend's upon us, I've sedated the goat, tempered the core, and the stallion is recovering nicely. And even though I know that disaster is lurking just around some corner, I stand, baseball bat at the ready, secure in the knowledge that even if I cannot fit under my bed anymore, there's still a closet, a flashlight and 265 books waiting for me at home.

After I read Walter's post, I was struck by the way a pre-Christmas discussion about scary books is collapsing into this one about happy endings. I remember, in that earlier discussion, that someone said something about the delicious feeling of being scared, about enjoying nightmares on a certain level. I shivered when I read it--if I have any enjoyment at all of my nightmares, it's thoroughly repressed, and when a friend of mine dragged me off to a scary movie recently with the fiction that it was about "strong women," she had to hold my hand in the opening scene and remind me that the movie makers were unlikely to kill off one of the main characters 2 minutes into the film. As I watched the movie, I noted that people must enjoy being scared or movies like that wouldn't be made, but I didn't enjoy a moment of it, nor have I enjoyed the ripple out effect of locking my car more often (in good ol' mostly safe North Dakota) with a catch in my throat at the strange night noises. Ever since my kids were born, I've been haunted by the awareness of their fragility, of the images of what could happen--and I remember that my mother-in-law, a sensible and gentle person, told me she couldn't listen to news reports during WWII when she was pregnant with my husband.

It's an interesting question, to me, whether stories give kids a false hope that things will always turn out well. I know that I, as a kid, always knew the world was an immense and scary place: maybe I had an over-active writer's imagination even then or maybe it's a result of moving to another continent when I was two. As an adult, I've read plenty of serious and sad books that were designed to closely reflect life. But I also don't forget that a legitimate and human-kind-long function of story has been to hold out a sense of order in the face of chaos--and to comfort.

Reply to message from tsmith+@pitt.edu of Fri, 08 Mar

---------- Forwarded message ----------
". . . just musing about Perry's and Katie's recent posts about different kinds of books, with different kinds of "endings." It strikes me that we're talking in a larger sense not just about types of books, but about the *reasons* we read books -- and that there are a lot of those!"

Thomas Smith, you are absolutely right. I am going to stop railing against _The Faithful Elephants_.

Okay, maybe I'm not, but I'll try to keep in mind the different reasons people have for reading books.

I'm on antidepressants (there goes my chance at the Presidency. Oh, darn.), and it could be that all my life I've wanted happy endings as a kind of self-medication.

Like Captain Kirk, "I don't believe in the no-win scenario," (at least in fiction).

I will quote a wise old professor of mine, who often proclaimed that"No book is read until it is re-read." She was, to my mind, absolutely right. For a good book, anyhow, more and more can be found in it with successive readings. For example, this is my 20th year of teaching Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" to a group of undergrads--the only novel I have EVER taught w.o a break for that length of time. I think it's brilliant; I've re -read it everytime I've taught it; I still don't know the text completely.

Walter writes:
"I believe the old adage that as children we read to find ourselves and as adults we read to escape from ourselves. Millions of 4th, 5th and 6th graders love to read books about the lives and times of 4th, 5th and 6th graders, whether by Louis Sachar, Barthe DeClements or Ann Martin. It is a rare adult who reads fiction about people who work in the same jobs and do the same things as themselves."

Maybe it's my own reading past, but I'm wondering whether we can really say that children reading about children their own age are finding themselves. To use one of the references above, is the appeal of Martin's Babysitters Club that children find themselves or that they find an idyllic world where friends are always supportive and problems solved?

The books I loved best as a child rarely spoke to the situation I was in--an only child with a widowed mother who worked full-time to make ends meet. Instead, I devoured the Bobbsey Twins for the sheer joy of being one with all of those children in a secure family that always helped other (less advantaged) people and had exciting adventures when they traveled. And read and reread the Oz books with their treks through fantastic landscapes, which had no connection with my suburban world. And the first three Anne of Green Gables books (the only ones I had or knew about) because Anne was such a fine (and sometimes funny) person and it was so thrilling to spend time with her. I also didn't like unhappy books--even remember giving up Wilder's Little House series after Jack died and Mary went blind; I'd had enough loss in my own life that I just didn't want to read about it in books, too.

I reread favorite books as a child, and still do. I still do both--have favorite cheerful books for when I'm feeling stressful or blue (like the Bagthorpes or Hildegarde Dolson's _We Shook the Family Tree_) and assorted characters that I just need to spend time with periodically plus various books that seem to become richer on progressive readings.

This has been my question re: children's books all along and I still can't decide which side I'm taking-- maybe I'm not taking either side. See, this is how REAL life is. Like someone said, and I realized several years ago, that life does not have an ending. What seems all calm and full of happiness one day might become disastrous and tragic in the next moment. Vice versa, of course. But, real life is full of neither-this-nor-that type of situations. I'm neither "extremely" happy, nor "dramatically" sad in my day-to-day life. Maybe that's why I like a story with "strong endings." Not the pittering down to "ok, this is how everything ends, bye now," after 1 or 2 hundred pages worth of my time. I need dramatic elements in stories. And I suspect this need is common in my fellow humans -- including, if not especially, children.

Since books (stories) can't simply be just like life, they have to end and end in a way that readers can be impacted upon. Happy ending, tragic ending, it does not matter to me (I think many children are stronger than their parents or teachers think and will not mind to have some tragedies in their reading experiences) as long as I am emotionally involved till the last moment of the book. I remember re-reading many "depressing" Andersen tales (Little Mermaid becoming some spirit that has to make 1000 kids laugh to gain a soul and the Little Match Girl going to "heaven" to meet her Grandmother can't be catagorized as happy or even hopeful endings. Not to 10 year old me, at least) and telling myself - I hate this, I hate this, and next thing I knew, I was reading them again!

My point is (I know you're all lost here.. ) that I still don't know whether all children's stories have happy endings and whether happy endings are good or bad to children. I think we all need all types of stories. Good, bad, happy, sad, humorous, moralistic -- for adults and for children, for sharing and for speculating on one's own.

I woke up this moring and what came to mind? -- childlit discussion of course! This is a response to Perry's first post -- I think to even speculate the possibility of Dirk and Duck affected by AIDS is to ignore the tone and the set-up of the whole book. It is, after all, a fairy tale -- with a magic lamb and three wishes, and "happily ever after."

As to other titles that might go either way:

Everyone wants a happy ending -- in Real Life. We are not to take tests to fail; we are not to marry someone to get divorced; we are not to make friends to get hurt; we are not to get a job to get fired... we WANT things to work out. If a friend is on stage, playing a role, we will not wish him/her to miss the cues or forget the lines. Same desire applies in reading. Most of the time, we want the protagonists to get what they set out to seek. Cinderella without meeting the prince or getting the help of the fairy godmother will not be a satisfying story.

And, the simple equation of Consumer's Demand = Publisher's Decision should explain why it is "courageous" to publish books without happy endings (or endings with up-lifting notes.)

That's why I was surprised by _Letters from the Inside_ and _After the First Death_. Granted, these two are both YA novels and maybe the publishers thought the Young Adults can handle the truth of life better? But, the bleak endings did make both titles more powerful and linger in one's memory longer than if they end differently.

What if Sylvester's parents never sat on the stone he turned into and picked up the magic pebble and made the wish -- brrrr.. it sends the chill down my spine. I think that would not make the book so loved by many. Readers want Sylvester to re-unite with the family. The "quest" (even if not a hero quest) is only completed if this happens. Such desire of a wholesome end to a trancherous journey lies deeply inside the human psyche and stories for children are there to fulfill this yearning.

I guess, after all, I'm for happy ending :) That explains why I like Cinderella type stories best. Sad ending stories are like spices -- a little bit to dress up the happy meal?

In a message dated 96-03-09 09:20:11 EST, Bonita writes:
"So, am I weird? Or do we all just have to know ourselves and help our children to know themselves, so we can choose what fits?"

No, you are not weird. You know your limits, which is one of the delights that reading affords us: self-knowledge.

In a message dated 96-03-09 10:43:28 EST, Jane Kurtz writes: "It's an interesting question, to me, whether stories give kids a false hope that things will always turn out well. I know that I, as a kid, always knew the world was an immense and scary place: maybe I had an over-active writer's imagination even then or maybe it's a result of moving to another continent when I was two...." (Long quotes snipped -- f-r.)
Ah, but it depends on how you define order and chaos, doesn't it? It seems to me that you have done the sensible thing for you and (for the purpose of this discussion) defined chaos as those elements over which you have no control. You then seem to define order as keeping those elements at bay. Quite sensible, especially given your extreme discomfort with violence. However, another person may make another choice. My point is that the process of reading and facing the "chaos" is the crucial factor for burgeoning child self-esteem. If they do not read up to the point where they find their boundaries, then how will they know what they can and cannot handle?

I love this topic!

Like Jane Kurtz, I have no desire to read books or watch movies which set out to frighten me. I have enough fears in real life that I don't enjoy having my heart pound, my palms sweat, and my stomach churn during my leisure times. Children, especially when they are teenagers as mine are, provide all the suspense, stress, and feelings of vulnerability I can handle.

I think that books offer me, now as they did when I was a child, not a false sense that things will turn out well, but fulfillment of my desire for things to be orderly and reach satisfactory conclusions. I believe that, as a child, I was quite realistic about the chaos of the world, the good and evil elements of human life, the ups and downs life takes. I had a good and relatively easy childhood but I also had lots of fears about losing that good life in some way. Books helped me to forget those fears temporarily and/or to put them into perspective. I think they helped me to dream without being unrealistic about life. As Jane said, I wanted and want to feel a sense of order and comfort from what I read.

It's certainly clear to me, however, that my lack of tolerance for chaos and for being frightened has not been passed on to my children. The movies they watch...I can't even listen to the soundtracks! But perhaps the level of tolerance is rising as I do belive that my children live in a far more difficult and scary world than I did only a generation ago.

And something about that bothers me. No wonder I cringe when first graders want to check Goosebumps out of the library. (No, I did not purchase them. They were either there when I took the job or donated.) I'd think I'd rather that they have a little less tolerance for terror.

This is sending my thoughts in several different directions. A very interesting thread.

On the basis of the message Constance posted to the list two weeks ago, I tracked down a copy of Palmer Brown's "Hickory" (Harper and Row, 1978), and was enchanted. It did remind me of Charlotte's Web, although on a much smaller scale -- the whole book is only 42 pages, including Brown's soft pen and colored ink illustrations.

(quote snipped -- f-r.)

I, too, found the ending most unusual in a book apparently aimed at young children. At the end the clock strikes "one," and Hickory realizes that he cannot stop time. The last sentence reads, "That night on these owl-haunted upper ridges there would be hard frost." The owls could mean death for the mouse, and the frost will certainly be death for the grasshopper. But somehow, I don't feel this as despairing. A page earlier we read, "Before them lay a hundred hills they might never climb and a hundred streams they might never cross, but they would try." Somehow, the trying, and the friendship between mouse and grasshopper is more important than death, which is, afterall, inevitable for all of us.

Interestingly, 2 of "Mr. Brown's earlier works are fantasies written in the tradition of the ultimate work of despair, Alice in Wonderland--but Brown's "take" on AW is lighter--more hopeful. I have often wondered what happened to this remarkable writer / illustrator in the 15 or so years between _Beyond the Paw Paw Trees_ and _Hickory_ to turn him from a light interpreter of fantastic traditions to a dark one."

Earlier in the book, when Hickory tells the story of the mouse who ran into the Swiss cheese just before the farmer's wife begins to cut it, "`And she cut another slice, and another, and another, and another!' The field-mice ran squealing before he could finish..." Each member of his family gives an opinion on Hickory's story, ranging from, it's not fair to begin a story without knowing the end, to, anyone can guess the ending, to the mother's "I don't want to hear it if the ending is sad," to the father's "All stories have their endings in their beginnings, if you know where to look." (A nice little exercise in reader-response here!)

Of course, this story begins with the the clock with its sad-eyed moon and the constant ticking away of time, and so it also ends. But paradoxically, the whole mood of the story, and the tone of the illustrations is cheerful, optimistic.

There is, as Constance says, much packed into this little book. I could see it becoming a family favorite, its poetry and expressions becoming part of family life, "Eat all you want," the father said, "but never leave paw-prints in the butter." How sad that this little gem isn't better known. Thank you, Constance!

I have been haunted by the (now old) thread on unhappy endings and children's literature. I rediscovered the following on the weekend and thought it applied:

Lies

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them that God's in his heaven
and all's well with the world is wrong.
The young know what you mean. The young are people.
Tell them the difficulties can't be counted,
and let them see not only what will be
but see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter
sorrow happens, hardship happens.
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
it will repeat itself, increase,
and afterwards our pupils
will not forgive in us what we forgave.

I have become fascinated by children's literature on the topics of war and the holocaust. If you have a favourite, please e-mail me.

I am not able to agree with this sentiment. I don't think young people need to be turned into cynics. Life experience will teach them that happy endings are scarce. But they need a positive goal, a hope for a future, not only a bleak ending set before them. And I don't think it IS a lie to tell kids that life is a WORTHWHILE struggle, albeit a struggle without guaranteed outcomes. Tragedies do happen, but rising above NOT WINNING is the spirit of triumph within.