‘Windows and mirrors’ in children’s literature : Issues and challenges

My studies this semester in Children’s and Young Adult Literature included the importance of books that can offer their readers “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (Bishop, 1990/2015) into the lives of people who are like, and also unlike, them. “Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience” (Bishop, 1990/2015, p. 1).

Several issues may influence my ability, as a youth librarian, to provide young readers with engaging books that speak to various backgrounds and perspectives.

Book bans on the rise
One issue is the ever-increasing number of attempts to ban books in libraries. Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, 2023, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services (Unite Against Book Bans, 2023). “Most of the challenges were to books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community” (Unite Against Book Bans, 2023, para. 2).

Of these challenges documented by the OIF, 49 percent were against books in public libraries, “compared to 16 percent during the same reporting period in 2022” (Unite Against Book Bans, 2023, para. 3).

Ninety-two percent of the books that were challenged, were part of attempts by a person or a group to censor multiple titles at a time. These attempts at censorship targeted 1,915 unique titles, and 3,923 titles in school districts and public libraries (Unite Against Book Bans, 2023).

In some cases, librarians have faced threats and loss of employment (ALA-APA, 2023) and have turned for redress to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Societal prejudice against types of diversity
Another issue affecting my ability to provide quality literature is that societal prejudices may influence how authors portray certain diverse characters, and how reviewers (and others) discuss certain types of diversity in books.

For example, in an article circa 2008, a writer for the Washington Post observed that of 25 winners and runners-up for the Newbery Medal, chosen from 2000 to 2005, “four of the books deal with death, six with the absence of one or both parents and four with such mental challenges as autism” (Strauss, 2008, para. 2).

The premise of Strauss’s article was that recent Newbery Medal winners were too challenging, and unappealing to young readers — and, as someone who is, herself, autistic, my reaction was to ask why Strauss had singled out autism when mentioning “mental challenges.” What about autistic people’s windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors? Was Strauss suggesting that our presence in children's literature made these books unpalatable?

More recently, I found an excerpt from a Booklist review for The Elephant in the Room on book author Holly Goldberg Sloan’s website. It stated that “Using multiple narrative perspectives, [Goldberg Sloan] touches on many weighty topics (grief, autism, deportation, animal cruelty), handling each with sensitivity” (Goldberg Sloan, n.d.).

I wondered about the inclusion of autism among the book’s “weighty topics,” so I compared the excerpt on Goldberg Sloan’s website with the original passage from the review, which stated: “Using multiple perspectives, she sensitively folds autism and weighty topics, such as grief, deportation, and animal cruelty, into the narrative” (Weisman, 2021; emphasis added).

Booklist reviewer Weisman had originally mentioned autism separately from the list of “weighty topics” addressed in Goldberg Sloan’s book — but Goldberg Sloan or someone had reworded the excerpt from Weisman’s original review and, in the process, conflated autism among the book’s “many weighty topics.”

How might considering autism to be a “weighty topic” influence the way that an author portrayed an autistic character? How might it skew a reader’s perception of that character?

Societal prejudice against types of genre
Graphic novels are not easier to read than traditional texts. “They often have higher and more challenging vocabularies” (Harrison, 2022, 09:43), plus “Graphic novels provide new learning opportunities for readers because the reading of these books requires different skills than traditional text” (Griffith, 2010, cited in Richardson, 2017, p. 26). In spite of this, some people believe that graphic novels are “not real books.”

A few years ago, I read a book, The Creativity Project, which featured a fantastic argument for comic books’ and graphic novels’ validity. A “mini comic” by Jarrett J. Krosocza depicted a former reluctant reader, Murray, enthusiastically checking out a “Chunky Cat” comics treasury from his school library. The librarian excitedly commented to Murray that “This is your tenth book this week!” (Krosocza, 2018, p. 135).

When Murray’s teacher, Ms. Obtuse, demanded that Murray choose “only real books” (p. 135) instead of the “Chunky Cat” comic book, the cartoon character of Chunky Cat materialized from the shelf and reminded Ms. Obtuse that when she was a kid, she read comic strips in the newspaper. “So you read comics for pleasure and then you grew up to be a voracious reader?” (p. 138).

The cartoon cat reminded Ms. Obtuse that the graphic novel “is a visual medium,” and that it’s “a great way to deliver information and improve inferencing skills” (p. 138). The mini-comic ended happily as Ms. Obtuse agreed that Murray could check out the “Chunky Cat” comic.

Outsider perspectives
Tschida, Ryan, and Ticknor mentioned that “books that include particular cultural groups may be written from outsider perspectives and therefore do not always represent a reality of those groups’ lived experiences” (2014, p. 28-29). That must surely be another issue influencing the quality of literature.

Reading the observation by Tschida, Ryan, and Ticknor concerning “outsider perspectives,” brought to mind a book by Leslie Connor that I’d read recently, Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? In a conversation between Connor and Roger Sutton (2021) of The Horn Book, Connor said that, for the book, she created two neurodiverse main characters. One of those characters was Frenchie, a boy who is nonvocal and intensely interested in birds; and the other was Aurora, a girl who tends to blurt out what she is thinking and has struggled with making friends.

Connor told Sutton that she did not label either one of these characters, stating that she “wanted to put the character before what might be called their disability or their neurodiversity” (Sutton, 2021, para. 15). The publisher, however, in its description of the book, explicitly labeled Frenchie, but not Aurora, as autistic (Connor, 2022, front jacket-flap, para. 2). Aurora was merely “cued as neurodiverse” in the words of a reviewer (Kirkus, 2022).

Connor had intended both of these characters to exist on the autism spectrum, so why was the publisher explicitly labeling only one of them as autistic?

And in an author’s note, when Connor expressed that she’d been “determined to get these characters right” (2022, p. 327), Connor said that she turned for comments to the parents of autistic sons. Connor also expressed appreciation for a sibling’s perspective.

Nowhere did Connor mention seeking input from autistic people themselves.

As a non-autistic, Connor can only offer the “outsider perspectives” discussed by Tschida, Ryan, and Tichnor. In my response to the book (Parkhill, 2022), I argued that the lived experiences of people on the spectrum could have provided Connor with valuable insights.

I don’t reject a book simply because the author does not share a common demographic with the characters being written about. But it’s important that such an author do their homework, and involve people who are part of that demographic to have input in a character’s creation: not just parents and siblings of people who are from that demographic, but from the actual people themselves.

Preconceptions by the librarian
One final issue that has to be addressed, concerns preconceptions by the librarian. My reading of Widdersheim and McCleary cautioned against the practice of “Assignment,” (2016, p. 726): that is, making assumptions about what books a person should like based on how they looked, or on what the librarian assumed to be their orientation or their sex. Instead, it’s important to recommend a book, “based on the quality of the story, not the gender or sexuality of its characters, and not based on the perceived gender or sexuality of readers” (Widdersheim and McCleary, 2016, p. 732).

Librarians must serve to the best of our ability
These multiple challenges may make it difficult to provide library services equitably, but it’s important that youth librarians do this job to the best of their ability. We must serve the cultural needs of the community in which we work, and that includes people who are in the minority.

In the case of book challenges, as I mentioned before, most of the challenges were to “books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community” (Unite Against Book Bans, 2023, para. 2).

During this oppressive climate, it is all the more important that I, as a librarian, guard against preemptively banning books. In its 2022 report on censorship in America, PEN America mentioned cases where school administrators banned books “in the absence of any challenge in their own district, seemingly in a preemptive response to potential bills, threats from state officials, or challenges in other districts” (Friedman & Johnson, “Preemptive Bans”).

But it’s important that we, as librarians, not capitulate and not do the work of the censors for them. Make them have to go to the trouble of actually challenging a book, and have a strong policy in place that forces would-be censors to really work at justifying their attempt.

Engaging stories can take many forms for many different readers, which means that, along with multiple types of stories, there must be multiple formats. Not everybody will want to read the latest Newbery Medal winner, just as Dog Man or Captain Underpants books will not appeal to every reader. Some readers will prefer to read a graphic novel, or a short-story anthology, and some will prefer audiobooks.

Some readers will prefer informational books, instead of reading works of fiction.

In regard to stories about people who are from a minority (however that minority is defined), it’s important that no one author presents the only story about minority characters. I remember the admonition by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie concerning the “danger of the single story” : “Show a people as one thing, and only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become” (2009, 09:36).

Instead of stocking just one book that addresses a minority experience, libraries need to offer several stories, with rich and varied perspectives.

I’ve talked about these challenges in relation to collection development and to readers’ advisory, but these issues can relate to other areas of librarianship too.

One example that came to my mind is in the realm of cataloging. How well do subject listings and other terms in catalog records support discoverability?

Baldwin-Sorelle (2020) pointed out that “Libraries rely on standardized data and vocabularies when organizing and describing records” (para. 2), and “Colloquial terms popular now are unlikely to yield substantial results in a library catalog – no matter how many Tumblr posts are tagged with ‘wlw’ or ‘sapphic,’ using those terms to search a library catalog is unlikely to yield much information on queer women” (para. 3).

And as a youth librarian, especially, one thing to keep in mind is that children often “lack some of the sophistication of adult users. They are more likely to use ‘bunny’ instead of ‘rabbit,’ less likely to know the difference between a subject and a keyword, and less likely to be looking for a specific author or title and more likely to be browsing” (Sullivan, 2013, p. 87).

As Fischer pointed out (2023, p. 4), “If bibliographic records do not include the terms that patrons search for, the materials they need will be hidden and inaccessible when they are needed the most.”

Another example might be the level and type of publicity given to certain types of books and programming, as well as how visibly the library expresses that it welcomes certain types of customers. Will all types of minorities feel equally welcome to look for books that speak to them? What if they apply for a job at the library? Are any minorities being left out when the library declares itself a diverse workplace and invites particular demographics to apply for positions?

References:
Adichie, C.N. (2009, Oct. 7). The danger of a single story [Video]. TED. https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg

ALA Allied Professional Association. (2023, Nov. 21). Fired librarians turn to EEOC. Library Worklife, 20(11). https://ala-apa.org/newsletter/past-issues/volume-20-no-11-november-2023/

Baldwin-Sorelle, C. (2020, June 30). Finding queerness in the catalog: How do you identify (me)? On the subject: Lehigh’s subject specialists write about research & scholarship. Lehigh University. https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/inlulib/2020/06/30/finding-queerness-in-the-catalog-how-do-you-identify-me/

Bishop, R.S. (2015). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Reading is Fundamental, Jan. 3, 2015. (Reprinted from “Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors,” 1990, Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6 [3]). https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf

Connor, L. (2022). Anybody here seen Frenchie? Katherine Tegen Books.

Fischer, R.K. (2023). Using the Homosaurus in a public library consortium: A case study. Library Resources & Technical Services, 67(1), pp. 4-15. https://journals.ala.org/index.php/lrts/issue/viewIssue/852/617

Friedman, J. & Johnson, N.F. (2022, Sept. 19). Banned in the USA: The growing movement to censor books in schools. PEN America. https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/

Goldberg Sloan, H. (n.d.) Book reviews. About the books: The elephant in the room. https://www.hollygoldbergsloan.com/the-elephant-in-the-room/

Griffith, P. E. (2010). Graphic novels in the secondary classroom and school libraries. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(3), 181–189.

Harrison, A. (2022). Graphic novels. University of Central Missouri, College of Education: Department of Educational Technology and Library Science.

Kirkus. (2022, Feb. 15). [Review of the book Anybody here seen Frenchie? by Leslie Connor]. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/leslie-connor/anybody-here-seen-frenchie/

Krosoczka, J.J. (2018). [Mini comic]. In Sharp, C. [Ed.], The Creativity Project (pp. 134-138). Little, Brown and Company.

Parkhill, C.M. (2022, April 3). ‘Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?’ and explicit recognition of autism. Cynthia Parkhill. https://cynthiaparkhill.blogspot.com/2022/04/anybody-here-seen-frenchie-and-explicit.html

Richardson, E. M. (2017). “Graphic novels are real books”: Comparing graphic novels to traditional text novels. Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 83(5), 24-31.

Strauss, V. (2008, Dec. 16). Critics say Newbery-winning books are too challenging for young readers. Arts & Living: Books. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/15/AR2008121503293.html

Sullivan, M. (2013). Fundamentals of children’s services (2nd ed.) American Library Association.

Sutton, R. (2021, Dec. 16). Leslie Connor talks with Roger. Notes from the Horn Book. https://www.hbook.com/story/leslie-connor-talks-with-roger-2021

Tschida, C. M., Ryan, C. L., & Ticknor, A. S. (2014). Building on windows and mirrors: Encouraging the disruption of “single stories” through children’s literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 40(1), 28-39.

Unite Against Book Bans. (2023, Sept. 30). ALA releases preliminary 2023 book ban data. News. https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/ala-releases-preliminary-2023-book-ban-data/

Weisman, K. (2021). [Review of the book The elephant in the room, by Holly Goldberg Sloan]. Booklist, 117(90), 3.

Widdersheim, M., & McCleary, M. (2016). Gender and sexuality, self-identity, and libraries: Readers’ advisory as a technique for creative (dis)assembly. Library Trends, 64(4), 714-740.