Before the holiday break, we hosted our federal representative Jim Cooper at my school. Soon after he left a newspaper reporter called for quotations. I thought it might be about the legislative visit, instead the reporter was writing an article about a local girl being featured on the cover of the newly redone Little House on the Prairie books. I was thrown for a loop because I hadn’t seen these books and my mind was on different areas, yet I still attempted to provide knowledgeable quotes. The article came out this weekend. Fortunately some of my teachers let me know because I hadn’t received it. Here is a section:
Metro librarians agree the splashier new covers might be more attractive to the young readers than the old pastel illustrations by Williams. “In the age of animé and graphic novels, the kids don’t always appreciate pastels,” says Diane Chen, librarian at Hickman Elementary School. She says children, mostly in the third and fourth grades, occasionally read the books, but “they don’t get heavy usage.” Instead, the children are reading series like Bailey School Kids, Captain Underpants, Magic Tree House and Junie B. Jones. Children’s reading appetites have been hugely changed by the Harry Potter and Charlie Bone fantasy novels, she adds. “There was a great deal more interest in the late 1980s or mid-1990s in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, but mainly it was sparked by teachers,” she says, noting that today’s young teachers probably didn’t read the books when they were kids.
Hope Hall, librarian at Croft Middle School, agrees that interest has waned among fifth-grade girls who might have carried their interest in the Little House books with them from elementary school. “I have the books and they circulate some, but you know, honestly it’s less and less.” She also thinks that’s due in part to “the Harry Potter phenomenon. I think that has made a shift toward fantasy.” Those books became blockbuster movies, something which also makes the children more interested in reading the books. In fact, she recalls that back when she was reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, “I watched the TV show.”
Many other classic children’s book series, like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys mysteries, have also gotten cover makeovers. Tara Weikum, executive editor of HarperCollins Children’s Books, says the local librarians echo the sentiments of educators the publishers surveyed before updating Little House. “We asked them: ‘Do your students pick these books up on their own?’ ” Weikum says. Basically, the answer was negative, with the educators adding that “the books looked too old-fashioned; they don’t look like now.”
I encourage you to go read the entire article and share your opinion of these color makeovers. Will changing the covers be enough to inspire a new generation? It has worked in the past. With today’s sophisticated readers and information consumers, will a simple cover change over-ride issues of bias, prejudice, and inaccuracies? I recall that I did talk quite a bit more during the phone interview and included information about other historical fiction titles that students do like to read. Some day I’ll take my own notes during an interview to keep track of what I really said and if the writer pulled out the best of my ideas or just the cute sound bites.
