Okay, this begins with a new book from Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls. Written for ages ten and up, it follows two girls (ages 11 and 12) in the early 1970s who become friends as they struggle with troubling family situations (one has parents in the death throes of a bad marriage, the other has a missing mother who left the family five years before). While the one girl does imagine her missing mother has become a fox (she knows this is a mind game to help deal with her life), the book is not a fantasy nor does it contain any fantastic elements. Sarah and Joan become friends, write a story that wins a contest, get into a writing workshop for kids over the summer and confront some truths about themselves and the people they love. Lots of growing up all around and as someone who has read the book, I can tell you it is very well written and young girls are going to love it. But this isn't about what I think; it's about a lot of other people.

Paul Kincaid reviewed the book for SF Site, probably because Murphy is a Nebula award winning writer who is clearly well known in SFF circles. His review (even he refers to it as "not one of my best reviews.." at his own lj) is not particularly insightful and it is safe to say he didn't really like the book. Jenn (aka Literaticat) took issue with the review and wrote a response at her LJ. (As most of you know, Jenn runs "Not Your Mother's Bookclub" and knows her books for kids, so to say her response is passionate is an understatement.) Gwenda picked up on the response and got many comments at her site, mostly about adults reviewing kid's books and if there is a difference between reviewing an adult book and a kid book and all that. (When I say "kid" book I mean MG or YA.)

Then Niall picked it up at his site and got way more comments as he asked some pointed questions about the difference between reviewing MG and YA fiction (Wild Girls is for age 10 and up which makes it MG, Kincaid referred to it as YA, Jenn made a point of saying he should know the difference) and adult vs YA fiction. Paul Kincaid found out all of this was going on from Niall's site and so he wrote about it at his LJ and everyone started having a party over there about YA, MG, American vs British kid books and on and on an on (and on....)

If nothing else, lots of folks now know that Pat Murphy has a new book coming out!

First, for those few who might still be wondering, there are some differences in MG and YA as far as content, etc. The easiest way to explain would be to consider the differences between a 10 year old and 16 year old - so not much in the way of swearing or sex in the MG books and little violence.

My ARC of Wild Girls labels the book as for ten and up or Grade 5 and up and from reading it (something that I should point out very very few of the commenters at all the above sites have done), it seems to be directed squarely at the older elementary school/middle school set (so the 10-13 year olds for you British readers). I'll go further and say this is really a book for 10-13 year old girls. That doesn't mean boys won't read it (or enjoy it) but when you combine two young female protagonists who turn to writing stories and journals to sort out their feelings about life well - that is very much a girl book (as any former bookish preteen female will tell you). But again - THIS DOES NOT MEAN a boy could not read it or a man could not review it. I'm just pointing out who will be primarily reading it, and that's something you have to think about when reviewing a book for kids. (You can't judge a book for a ten year old as to whether or not a 40 year old likes it, plain and simple. Does it still have to be well written well yes, of course, but what a ten year old wants to read about is not what a 40 year old wants to read about and you have to think about that when reviewing kid books. You just have to, period.)

But aside from all this MG vs YA stuff, my issue with Paul's review is more that he clearly didn't think much of the book - and I don't mean that he wrote a negative review, I mean he didn't think much about this book at all. Consider this sentence:

"This is writing reduced to a simple lesson in life, light, appealing and entertaining but very definitely aimed at a younger audience by removing any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects."

Well, it is aimed at a younger audience (age 10 and up) so I don't understand why the fact that it does that should be framed as a criticism. Maybe he didn't mean it as a criticism but that is how it seemed to come across. More importantly, he says no "doubts, hesitation or darker aspects" are in the book and yet I found Murphy's descriptions of the two families to be quite dark - specifically the tension she writes about in Joan's family. Here's an example:

My mother and father did not like one another much. Dinner was just about the only time they sat down together. A vague sense of tension always hung over the table, centering on my father. He was always angry - not about anything in particular, but about everything, all the time. But he pretended he wasn't angry. He was always joking but the jokes weren't very funny.

That's on page 13 and the tension in that house builds as the story progresses. Murphy does a great job of showing how that sort of atmosphere works on kids trapped in the middle, how siblings will turn on each other to deflect negative attention, how kids must take sides between parents, how you try to pretend you don't know what's going on even when you do, how everyone lies and pretends it's all okay. This is real dark - the kind of dark that a lot kids can identify with. And even though it doesn't seem bad (no one is getting raped or beaten or left on the side of the road so it can't be really bad, can it?), it is hard and it lives in you forever.

Trust me - you never forget all that time spent pretending to be part of a happy family.

Paul also did not see the book as subtle or complex, yet I thought by writing about the breakup of a family - and taking the time to make every single family member a fully fleshed out character - Murphy was doing something both unusual and very complex here. She walks a tightrope of showing how a dying marriage looks to the children while still keeping the adults real. Neither the father or mother is a monster and although the father at first seems to be the fall guy, Murphy goes out of her way to humanize him (more than once). Readers might not agree with him or what he does, but they will understand his motivations just as Joan eventually does. That's not an easy thing to do in a book - for adults or kids - and Murphy does it very well. So I think she has crafted a complex story. It's not complex in terms of plot but when it comes to characterization and emotion - well yeah, I think she has done some fine work.

Paul also states that the girls are isolated, and that Sarah's father (a "successful" SF writer) "pretty well leaves Fox [that's Sarah's nickname] to get on with her life the way she wants" and their mutual isolation draws the girls together. Actually, that's not true. First, Murphy makes it clear that Sarah's father is not a successful writer - he's a paid one, but the house they live in was willed to them and the paint is peeling, the linoleum cracked, etc. Joan's mother mentions giving some of Joan's clothes to Sarah as hers are torn. This isn't a major plot issue but it makes me think Paul gave the book only a cursory look, something that his comments on isolation further support. When some bigger boys find the girls in the woods and threaten them, it is Sarah's father who quickly comes to the rescue - he knows where she is and is not far away. And while neither girl is popular in school (especially Sarah), Joan's neighbor Cindy easily befriends her and she joins the Girl Scouts (at her mother's urging, but she makes a point of saying she enjoys their company). Further, every step of the way in the book the girls have a parent (and later Joan's brother) along with them. I don't think it was deep seeded issues of isolation that drew them together; Sarah is angry over her mother leaving and very shy and Joan is a new kid in town. They make friends because they find each other one day and then they realize they like each other. It's that simple and when they find a mutual joy in creating stories, the friendship is cemented.

By missing all this, by reading it wrong, I think a lot was lost in the review.

Finally, Paul has this comment: "The Wild Girls is clearly written and very readable, but in its praise of writing as a way of coping with whatever the world may throw at you it feels somewhat simplistic."

See that's where I really felt the split between an adult male and a preteen girl. Young girls in particular love to write. They write bad poems, bad stories, notes in class and many many overly dramatic diary entries. Writing is a big deal to them as an age group and it does help in all kinds of ways. In this case, I didn't think that learning to be better writers solved all their problems - the problems were being solved (one way or another) by the adults. What Sarah and Joan had to do was learn how to be brave enough to see their parents as people and not just parents and to share their own thoughts and concerns about the decisions those parents were making. They did this not only through the writing lessons but also through the friendships they made in the workshop. There were no easy endings in this book; there was just learning how to live with their families and the world around them. In that respect, Murphy showed how writing out your feelings can help and I think that is true and, more importantly, real to the age group reading this book.

What I couldn't help but wonder about this review is if maybe Paul was comparing Wild Girls too much to some of Murphy's earlier titles and thus found it wanting in "darkness" or some adult themes she has addressed elsewhere. This is when I begin to think that maybe he came looking for something in this book that he did not find and was disappointed about that - thus having preconceived ideas about what the book should be and not judging it on its own merits.

Honestly I review books for kids all year and anyone who thinks it is easy for an adult to do - or that it is the same as reviewing an adult book - is wrong. When you read a book written for adults you are the audience for that book and you can judge it directly on your own response to it (like it/don't like it/bored by it, etc.) But an adult reading a book written for children (or teens) has to think (to a certain degree) like a kid when reading the book. Yes, I know if it is great it will be great regardless of the age of the reader but I'm sorry - by and large what is great to a 10 year old is not even good to many adults. That's because we are interested in different things. It's like me trying to get my step father to read the latest SF title I can't put down. If it has rockets in it and it's not nonfiction then he thinks it's garbage, plain and simple.

Again, does that mean that writing for children can be of poor or lesser quality? No - of course not. But the writing that an adult would love is not going to appeal to most children (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, on and on and on). If a child reviewed The Great Gatsby and said there was too much symbolism in the story and it was unclear, would we all agree or say a child couldn't understand the significance of that symbolism? Audience matters, that is why it is so frustrating when a non genre reviewer reads a SF novel and rakes it over the coals - or when all those reviewers said Harry Potter was too overwritten. I think JK Rowling knew her audience and she wrote the way they wanted to read.

And those books are going to last forever, whether everyone agrees they deserve to or not.

Niall notes in his post that Jenn was saying Wild Girls was good, full stop - not just as a kid book. And he said that if she's saying that, then you have to judge it on the same merits as an adult book (thus you can't consider the audience). (He used Octavian Nothing as an example here and I have to tell you - I didn't like that book. But I do get his point.) Jenn chimed in later in the comments and said yep, it is good - full stop. As for me, I don't pick year's best but I will say that this is a book I would press on all the 9-10 (and up) bookish type kids I know (all of whom are girls I'm afraid). It does not beat say, Jo Walton's Ha'penny or Nicholas Christopher's The Bestiary or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, of Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl all of which I read this year. But I do think it is one of the best books I've read recently and I'm looking forward to reviewing it next month in my column. Which brings me around to the one thing that is clear to me in all this:

You can't phone in a review on the internet.

I think Paul Kincaid didn't like The Wild Girls all that much and wrote a short review that is a somewhat inaccurate synopsis of the book and also just rather dull. It's not about the review being positive or negative, it's about it not being a worthy review. This doesn't make him a bad reviewer (please don't think I'm saying that), it just means in this case he didn't give the book the attention someone who felt strongly about it would have. And then someone who is passionate about the book (that would be Jenn) jumped on him for it and then everybody else jumped on both of them over issues that had less to do with the book and more about who can review it - or should review it. I know it is hard to be bright and insightful and witty in all this review writing but if I can't contribute something (one way or the other) about a book - if I just don't care about it enough to do that level of work - then I don't write about it. And maybe Paul should have skipped this one and waited for a book he does care about.

As for me, I liked it for many many reasons, some of which have to do with me once being an 11 year old girl who wrote a lot stories and found that writing could change my world.

Sometimes, things do just work out that way.