Recently, a headline in The Times caught my eye: Make boys read books with girls in says Chocolat author Joanne Harris. Speaking at the Hay Festival, Harris announced ‘we’ve got to stop giving them the message that it’s wrong for a boy to read books about girls, because even schools are giving them this message.’
As a children’s author, I struggle with this kind of mindset. I don’t consciously create characters to suit a supposed readership; they spring to life according to the needs of the story. My first book, Ante’s Inferno, had a 12 year-old heroine, Ante, while in The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst, the main character is a boy. With The Fall of a Sparrow, I was back to a female protagonist, Eleanor, and arguably taking an even greater risk of limiting my readership by setting the story in a girls’ boarding school, meaning the supporting cast, too, was mostly made up of girls.
A risk, that is, if you buy into the idea that boys can only cope with reading about themselves.
A gripping plot appeals to boys as much as girls
Which I don’t. Boys are just as capable of identifying with a hero of the opposite sex as girls are; the key is the story itself. Plunge your main character into a hair-raising situation, like, oh I don’t know, having to fight off monsters and cross rivers of fire while journeying through hell (Ante’s Inferno); pile problems on them until they can see no way out but by making a dangerous pact with a demon (The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst); or draw them into a chilling mystery in which trivial, seemingly innocent details build up until scary ‘accidents’ start to happen (The Fall of a Sparrow); and whether it’s a boy or a girl driving the story won’t matter. Boys will enjoy a gripping plot as much as girls… as long as you let them.
As long as no disapproving adult – parent, teacher, family friend – tells them they shouldn’t.
Bad news for boys and authors alike
I have to admit I thought we’d got beyond this. I’ve done school visits in all kinds of schools – boys only, girls only, co-ed – and have been delighted to find boys as eager as girls to hear about my stories, and queue up for signed copies. These places clearly valued reading as a wonderful gift for all children, not to be limited by long outdated stereotypes.
But if what Joanne Harris said is true, many boys are still having their fun destroyed and opportunities for wide reading curtailed; even more so, when you think how many children’s books in the last couple of decades centre on a girl as main character (to redress the balance of the last 150 years or so). Bad news both for boys and for authors, but Harris takes it further than that. Missing out on empathising with female characters, she reckons, leads boys, once grown up, to value women less. ‘A boy who is afraid to read a book with a girl protagonist will grow up into a man who feels that it’s inappropriate for him to listen to a woman’s voice.’
How the damage is done
Yikes. I hope it’s not as bad as that. Surely reading children’s books with exclusively male heroes when young doesn’t turn all men into misogynists.
But I fear Harris may be on to something here. It’s not the limited reading in itself, it’s being told at an impressionable age by a respected adult that books with heroines are beneath them.
That’s where the damage is done. And it doesn’t need to be that way.
(From an article first published on Authors Electric.)
Griselda Heppel 