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Originally Posted by Lalaith
It really annoys me when children's literature is praised for being "real life" and that this "reality" equals foster homes, ASBOs and abuse.
OK, that sort of thing is unfortunately a reality for some children but not the majority. Why is the reality of ordinary children somehow less valid than that of the deprived minority?
I would argue that for most readers, the "gritty realist" novels by the likes of Jacqueline Wilson - mothers who are profoundly mentally ill, children in foster homes, whatever - are actually fantasy. Because they have nothing to do with the reality of the children reading them.
I was there - I had the first wave of "social realist" literature for young people inflicted on me when I was little. "John sat in a ****-stained cement stairway on his grim council estate, trying to come to terms with his parents' divorce....."
Strewth.
Give me Hogwarts and Hobbiton any day.
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Oh I'm with you!! But then 'snot and tears' sells these days - look at all the stuff selling to the grown ups - endless autobiographical accounts of the most gruesome, awful kinds of abuse that people have endured, and that stuff is always top of the bestseller lists. You cannot even read a celebrity biography without it revealing some kind of dreadful secret that we really
don't need to know about - Gery Halliwell bellyaching about her cake 'n' puke sessions for example. Everyone's got to have had that bit harder of a life than the next person. It's like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch - "I used to live in a semi detached in Swindon and we never went to France on holiday" "Luxury! I was in the Priory for seven months due to an addiction to online poker, all because my mother used to make me do my homework every night".....etc.....
So we aint even got
fantasy celebs to look up to any more. Bring back people like Audrey Hepburn, please....
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Originally Posted by Lommy
And this has very little to do with the thread topic, but as it's somewhat related I can ramble a bit about it as well. Why are fantasy books separated from other books in libraries and bookshops?
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I think it's because they think we
smell or something - you know, let's keep the SF fans in one corner,
with their own kind....
Or it could just be marketing of course yet again - like you say, not all books with wizards in are fantasy, so why cordon books off into one section? It's because they want to sell things to us, things they think we might be tempted by. They do the same thing now in music shops which really, really annoys me as it takes ten times as long to find what you want...