On Nov. 16, just in time for the holidays, the New York Times Book Review treated its readers to a special round-up of the year's best reading for children. This sort of section is meant as a guide to readers shopping for gifts. Instead it reveals the Times Book Review's peculiar view of childhood -- and of its readers.
For starters, there's "a delicately wrought piece of fiction": Norma Fox Mazer's When She Was Good, which the Times blurbs: "Em's mother is dead. Her father is long gone. Her abusive sister has just died. What next?"
And then there's Brock Cole's The Facts Speak For Themselves, the story of a 13-year-old girl having an affair with a middle-aged real-estate broker. Weak-kneed parents are reassured that it turns out all right: The older man is murdered in the girl's arms by her mother's ex-boyfriend, who then kills himself.
For more serious-minded children, there's Naomi Shihab Nye's Habibi: Reviewed under the title "Where Rage Lives" (ages 10 and up), it tells the story of an apolitical little Palestinian girl who moves to Jerusalem and learns the proper attitude when Israeli soldiers break into her grandmother's house and smash her bathroom. And of course there are always the many works of Judy Blume, whose lifetime achievement is the subject of an adulatory essay that concludes, "In 1975, when the [teenage] heroine of [Blume's] Forever decided to go on the pill, the book was daring. Now it is quaint. . . . In this age of Heather Has Two Mommies, we clearly live after the flood. We might pause to thank the author who opened the gates."
Finally, former Times columnist Anna Quindlen finds her true metier, reviewing Betsy Hearne's Seven Brave Women. "My mother does not believe that wars should be fought at all," the book's narrator declares. "She says history should be her story, too, and she tells stories about all the women in our family who made history by not fighting in wars." Calling the book "a rich resource for educating little girls" and "an important book for boys as well," Quindlen gushes: "It illumines and honors the sacrifices made, not in the service of our country, but in the service of our families and ourselves."
Is it really brave, a "sacrifice" even, to do things that serve not just our families but ourselves? If so, THE SCRAPBOOK would like to recommend that this holiday season readers make the heroic "sacrifice" of ignoring the recommendations of the Times Book Review.