Illustrations in middle-grade novels

Middle-grade might be far from picture books, but that doesn't mean our novels lack in art. Illustrations in middle-grade novels, to me, are an unexpected but delightful surprise. Because novels more often than not contain no illustrations at all, finding little bursts of art is like uncovering a loonie in a pile of dimes and nickels. (In case you're American and/or don't know what a loonie is: here you go.)

And here, when I speak of illustrations, I include everything small-scale yet intricate chapter headings to full-page illustrations. This comprehensive article from Publishing Crawl on the design process covers many behind-the-scenes details on the process of choosing an illustrator and decisions on illustrations; it's definitely worth a read.

 But on a more simple, reader level,  I wanted to share some personal favourites. I adore chapter heading/first page drawings, like the kinds found in Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier:

And take a look at the in-chapter drawings from The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy:

Text + art will always be a winning combination in my opinion. (I could go on and on about typography art... but that'd take an entire other post.) So what do you love most about illustrated middle-grade novels?

Hungry? Middle Grade Books for the Cooks among Us

Hungry? Me too. That’s why the topic of this post today is about middle grade books that have something to do with cooking and include recipes. These sorts of books have been very popular in the last few years. Even before the rise in reality television cooking shows, books with a cooking aspect have been popular in adult fiction, especially in cozy mysteries. Apparently, restaurant owners and bakers stumble across dead bodies far more frequently than the general population. It makes sense books with recipes and some sort of tie-in to cooking would also be popular in middle grade. Many kids that age want to learn to cook, seeing it as an adult skill. (They don’t yet realize the drudgery of cleaning up!)

Anyway, my daughter (12) has been on kick to read as many of these books as possible. These books are sweet and quiet, good for kids who don’t necessarily want a swashbuckling read all the time. Here’s a few of our favorites. If you know of more, please list them in the comments and I’ll edit the post to add a list at the end.

THE TEASHOP GIRLS by Laura Shaefer

Three best friends who call themselves the Teashop Girls find their friendship strained as they all begin to pursue different interests, and one girl, Anne, feels left behind. Anne starts to work at her grandmother’s teashop, but when it looks like the place will be closing, the girls try to find a way to keep it open. Good recipe: Scumptious Oatmeal Chip Cookies

STIR IT UP by Ramin Ganeshram

Anjali Krishnan works in her family’s roti shop in Queens, but she really wants to become a celebrity chef. When she gets a chance to compete on a kid’s reality cooking show, she’s thrilled, only to find her parents’ beliefs clash with her dreams. Good recipe: Deema’s Easy Curry Chicken

PIE by Sarah Weeks

When Alice's Aunt Polly passes away, she takes with her the secret to her world-famous pie-crust recipe. In her will, Polly leaves the recipe to her crabby cat Lardo, and leaves Alice with the responsibility of caring for Lardo, but no one knows where the recipe is. Everyone in town wants to either find it, or come up with their own version to bring back the tourists who came for Polly’s pies. Good recipe: Buttermilk Pie

~Dee Garretson

Down to Earth Middle Grade Science Fiction

I like my Sci. Fi. a little on the realistic side and The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh fits the bill nicely.

A tiny snippet about The Green Book without any spoilers:

"We are at Shine, on the first day," says Pattie, when, as the youngest member of the group, she is given the honor of naming the new settlement. Refugees from the dying planet Earth, they, along with other ships, have been sent into space in the hope that some of them will survive to continue the human race. But the success of Shine remains doubtful as crops fail and provisions brought from Earth dwindle.

I like this book so much that I’ve reread it a few times since discovering it about 12 years ago, and even though it is a middle grade novel I’ve used it successfully with high school students because the themes in it are for all ages. I’ll probably use it with my fifth grade class later this year.

It is a cool combination of survival and group dynamics, and what they find on their new planet is just plain amazing. At a little over a 100 pages it is a quick read, but the story will linger in your brain.

What’s your favorite middle grade science fiction title?

Guest Post & Giveaway with Claire Legrand

With the beginning of a new school year in the mix, an occasion that many students and teachers find horrifying, I thought it’d be good to have Claire Legrand stop by to discuss horror in middle-grade books. It’s a tough thing to pull off in MG—horror—because you need to observe the line between scary and too scary, and Claire, whose debut THE CAVENDISH HOME FOR BOYS AND GIRLS, is here to offer her take. She is in the midst of a long blog tour, so check out the link at the end of the post to see where she'll be next. First, here’s a bit about Claire.

Claire Legrand is a Texan living in New York City. She used to be a musician until she realized she couldn’t stop thinking about the stories in her head. Now a full-time writer, Claire can often be found typing with purpose on her keyboard or spontaneously embarking upon adventures to lands unknown. The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls is her first novel, due out August 28 from Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. Her second novel, The Year of Shadows, a ghost story for middle grade readers, comes out August 2013. Her third novel, Winterspell, a young adult re-telling of The Nutcracker, comes out Fall 2014.

So, without further adieu, here is Claire to talk about horror in MG.

The Challenges (and Fun Parts!) of Writing MG Horror

At first, I didn’t like calling Cavendish a horror novel. “Horror” sounded so uncouth, so bloody and gory. It brought to mind cheesy slasher movies like Friday the 13th or—heaven help me—the Child’s Play movies (i.e., Those Movies That, Though I Have Not Seen Them, Traumatized Me For Life Simply By Being on a Shelf in Blockbuster Where I Could See Their Covers). When people say “horror,” it can elicit a revolted response from certain readers. Most people love comedies, or dramas, or action-adventure stories. But horror? To me, horror has always been a niche genre of storytelling that only a certain minority of people can stomach and enjoy.

Before selling Cavendish, I’d always called it a “dark fairy tale,” and I still like that classification. Cavendish is the kind of story you read to your children before bed, along with other tales about witches and kidnapped kids, dark fantastical creatures and towns that aren’t quite right.

But I’ve come to realize that, broadly speaking, Cavendish is horror. Pure, straight-up horror. Terrifying, unthinkable things happen, and not everything turns out okay for our heroes in the end. I’ve accepted this genre classification wholeheartedly. Why? Well, first of all, “horror” is a much easier label to explain than “dark fairy tale.” But there’s another reason, too.

Writing horror, quite simply, is fun. Especially writing horror for kids. Why wouldn’t I want to embrace this?

Uncovering the darkest parts within yourself and then writing about them, preferably in a safe apartment with lots of lights and cuddly blankets, is a great way to exorcise fears (although I am still terrified of bugs, even after writing Cavendish). Returning to the mindset of 9- to 12-year-old kid thirsty for scares, a kid ready to believe anything, read anything, be scared by anything, no matter how outrageous (Slappy the ventriloquist dummy from R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books come to mind)? That’s fun, and liberating, like riding a roller coaster for the first time, or closing the bathroom door and saying “Bloody Mary” three times in the dark . . . and surviving. That’s the kind of pure thrill we seldom experience as adults, simply because we’ve experienced it so many times. The rush has diminished.

But as a kid in bed with a flashlight or sitting around a campfire with his friends, reading about things he’s never dared to imagine? Things that have always crept around the edges of his mind like vague shadows he was afraid to focus on for too long? That kid will remember those first horror books, those first deep scares, for the rest of his life. As an adult, he’ll see that book on the shelf, and shiver, and grin, and remember the exact way his heart pounded as he flipped frantically through those last, terrifying pages. I know I remember the first time I read The Dollhouse Murders. The Painted Devil. A Darker Magic. Night of the Living Dummy. They all scared me deep down to my bones. And now, even though I will probably forever fear dolls, dummies, or anything resembling dolls and dummies, I wouldn’t trade those literary experiences for anything.

For all the delicious glee that comes with crafting a child’s future psychological idiosyncrasies, writing horror for children can be extremely challenging, too. How scary is too scary? How dark is too dark? (My grandmother, who responds to all my writing with a kind but bewildered, “Where does all this dark stuff come from, Claire Bear?” would probably say that Cavendish is too scary and dark. But I disagree!)

When writing Cavendish, I only once stopped to think, “Is this too scary? Is this too much?” (And I think you’ll know which element I’m referring to once you read the book.) Aside from that, I wrote exactly the kind of scariness that had haunted me as a young reader, the kind of pure, raw scariness that you find in the darkest of fairy tales. Nothing so unsophisticated as people jumping out from dark corners or monsters with drooling black gums. No, the scariness that hooked me as a child, that still haunts me to this day, was the elemental horror. The horror that someone could take over your mind. Make others forget about you. Make you forget about yourself. Change you, forever, and in such a way that you wouldn’t notice, or even care.

That kind of horror poured out of me when writing Cavendish. I didn’t actually worry if it was too scary for kids because kids are smart. They can handle reading about dark, terrible things because they are so incredibly open, so accepting of the fact that there is evil in the world and so hopeful that it can be beaten. 

What I did worry about at times—and this was after the book was written, once I began revisions—was whether parents would find it too scary. Teachers. Librarians. I think older readers scare more easily than their child counterparts. Maybe it’s that they’ve experienced real horror in the world, and seen how it so often can’t be beaten. Or it’s that they want to protect their children from even a fantastical, literary version of that horror for as long as possible.

Whatever the case, it was a real concern for me in the revisions stage, and it was a concern for some at my publishing house as well. Would the horror in Cavendish be too . . . well . . . horrifying to sell to the people buying these middle grade books, i.e., the gatekeepers?

The two things I focused on to get me through revisions, through these doubts and questions about whether or not I’d gone too far, were the following two mantras: Trust your readers. And trust your story.

The first mantra, trust your readers, I’ve already addressed. Kids are smart, savvy, and resilient, and they’ll be much more receptive to books and reading in general if neither coddles them or tries to hide them from darkness.

The second mantra, trust your story, is all about authorial accountability. If sitting down to write middle grade horror, consider the following: What story am I trying to tell? What tone am I trying to convey? What scary elements are necessary to communicate these things? And then, once those questions are answered, write exactly that. As with all the best horror stories, whether book or film, it’s not about how many scares you can fit into one story. It’s about what kind of scares, and how they’re fit into the story, and how they serve the story. Gratuitous violence, gotcha! moments, and gore may provide superficial shock value. But they don’t enhance a story’s core; and, even more importantly for authors of children’s literature, they could make booksellers, parents, and other gatekeepers balk.

Tell the story you need to tell, and use horror elements that are appropriate for that story. Just as, if I were writing a young adult novel, I wouldn’t insert gratuitous sex scenes or cursing just to be “edgy,” so would I refrain from inserting gratuitous horror elements in any story, but especially a middle grade story, just to get cheap scares.

After all, the best horror stories are those that make us work for the scares, those that take their time setting up a world and characters that feel real and relatable. That way, when the true horror begins, the story doesn’t need to rely on camera tricks or their literary equivalent to scare its readers. The story only needs to play out as it was meant to, a tale of normal people in a normal world that’s going slowly, irrevocably bad, and the heroine fighting to save it—even if her victory comes a little bit messily.

Make sure to check out the rest of the Cavendish Blog Tour here!

And go say hi to Claire at her blog | twitter | facebook | tumblr | goodreads

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