International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

I think it is this sense of restriction—of not feeling perfectly free to express all he

knows to be true of teenage sexual feelings and the teenagers’ deepest attitudes

toward them – that so often pulls the quality of a writer’s work for this age down to

the level of the bland and superficial.

‘McLuhan youth and literature’, in Heins 1977:113

The main problem has generally been with ‘realism’—usually equated with the less
pleasant or socially acceptable aspects of realism. The movement towards political
correctness has made matters more complex than they were in the days of H.Rider
Haggard:

Personally, I hate war, and all killing...but while the battle-clouds bank up I do not

think that any can be harmed by reading of heroic deeds or of frays in which brave

men lose their lives.

What I deem undesirable are the tales of lust, crime, and moral perversion with

which the bookstalls are strewn by the dozen.

Rider Haggard 1926:105

At the end of the century, it could be argued that the reverse pertains. Certainly the
concept of truth-telling has shifted. One of the leaders of what might be called the ‘ultra-
realists’ is Robert Cormier:

I don’t think a happy ending should be one of the requirements of a children’s book.

Kids want their books to reflect reality. They know that the bully doesn’t always get

his comeuppance in the end.

West 1988:30

I think there’s a lot going on in today’s world that we have a false view of. Television

in particular is lying to us... We know life isn’t always fair and happy. There are

enough books with happy endings. I think there’s room for the realistic novel about

things that really go on in the world. I try to write a warning about what’s waiting

out there.

Elkin et al. 1989:13

This is not a new idea. The artist Edward Ardizzone:

I think we are possibly inclined, in a child’s reading, to shelter him too much from

the harder facts of life. Sorrow, failure, poverty, and possibly even death, if handled

poetically, can surely all be introduced without hurt... If no hint of the hard world

comes into these books, I’m not sure that we are playing fair.

‘Creation of a picture book’, in Egoff 1980:293

Realism, in short, presents writers with a difficult problem. Here is Ursula Le Guin, one
of the major fantasy and science fiction writers of the twentieth century (101–113):

558 THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE