I had a thrill that I immediately shared with everyone I
could reach, including my 19 year old daughter – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor was
coming to Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore this past Saturday! Oh, joy! Ecstasy!
If the name doesn’t come to mind, she wrote several series of books; the
oldest, Shiloh¸ was set in West
Virginia, and featured a young beagle and a strong-minded boy, versus the dog’s
owner, a hard drinking man living on his own in the mountains.
It would be easy to just hate the man, and love the dog and
the boy. But being Naylor, she doesn’t make it that easy. You want the boy to
just take the dog and run, but that’s not that easy, either. The boy’s father
forces him to confront issues of differing attitudes in the country towards pet
ownership (is it a pet, or livestock –with a mission as a hunting dog?). What
rights does this man have, as the owner? But then, what rights does the dog
have, to food and shelter, and freedom from fear? Naylor wrote about these issues, in the context of poverty
and isolation in the mountains of West Virginia, with a straightforward
approach that earned her the Newbery Award in 1992.
Naylor writes several series, including The Boys Against the Girls, the Witch saga, the Bernie Magruder series (The Besseldorf Mysteries), and perhaps her most famous series, the just completed Alice
books. Her books are often funny enough to make you laugh aloud and
draw somewhat curious stares; like the best young adult and children's literature, they're just good books, and adults enjoy them as much as kids do. The final Alice book, entitled, Now I’ll Tell You
Everything, covers Alice's college years, with appropriately adult topics. The only issue is that sometimes the fourth grader who loved Alice in Blunderland may also want to read the book about Alice in college - and this may pose a problem for her parents. It's simply not appropriate, featuring such issues as an attempted date rape. This is a good topic to discuss with middle school students and up, but even with-it Ann Arborite parents may shrink from discussing what exactly is going on in some of the well-written descriptions of what very nearly goes horribly awry for one of the characters.
Naylor’s current book tour brought her to Ann Arbor this past Saturday, and she discussed how she had intended for the first Alice novel to be a single book.
“And then the letters started pouring in,” she said. “And
the reviewers said they couldn’t wait to see what happened next.” She decided
she would be willing to write a series – provided she would only need to write one a
year. “I did not want to be stuck writing a sit-com,” she said. But initially,
being consistent with the details was not as easy as it seemed.
“You might notice in the first few books, that Alice has
three different birthdates – all in May,” she observed. So the publisher finally
hired a researcher/writer to create an “Alice encyclopedia”, which both she and
the Alice fact checker/editor could use to insure that all the books were
consistent. Does Elizabeth, in fact, have pierced ears? What’s the name of
Pamela’s parents? “I used it all the time,” Naylor confessed.
Naylor also observed that the Alice books pop up on the
yearly “Most Banned Books in America” lists. “And every time I finished a book,
I would stop and think, now what on EARTH could they possibly object to in THIS
one? And I never could figure it out,” she said. “But one condition I insisted
on with my publishers was that Alice be allowed to grow up, and change from book to book, and so the girls do talk about things
that girls talk about, like sexuality and boys. And in one book the girls talk
about losing their virginity. So that did get me in trouble.”
There was a low laugh from the audience. And then a little
voice piped up from the back of the room. “What’s ‘virginity’?” said a young
girl.
And there was a much bigger laugh.
In trouble again, Mrs. Naylor.
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