The Last Page
Barkan, Joanne
Ten years ago, I signed my first contract for a book in the middle-grade fiction category— a Bobbsey Twins mystery about sunken treasure. For the treasure, I devised a gold Aztec...
...knowing the story doesn't deter them...
...For example: One day, Maida walks into the family mansion library while an art appraiser examines her father's latest acquisitions...
...Yet, when I started looking at art attentively as an adolescent, Titian and Vermeer seemed not only familiar ("There's the red hair"), but also approachable for some initial analysis ("What makes that yellow and blue so appealing...
...The scene was a throwaway, a few paragraphs that provided a nice setting for an unrelated conversation...
...you get more of what you already like...
...On the basis of these colors, he declares the first painting an authentic Titian and the second a true Vermeer...
...I turned in the book outline...
...JOANNE BARKAN q 128 • DISSENT...
...Finally, kids often meet up with a comic book, television show, or abridged version years before they can tackle the original...
...So I changed my Aztec statuette into a jeweled tiara and canned the museum...
...The appraiser focuses on the distinctive red used for a woman's hair in one painting and the clear yellow and blue tones prominent in another...
...When they're older, how much remains from the first encounter...
...The fulllength version of an abridged story has added appeal...
...It's the old "Classic Comics" dilemma: having ingested the comic-book version of Ivanhoe, would readers then bypass the original...
...a favorite book gets read a dozen or more times...
...So do their parents...
...According to the editors, everything worked fine except my choice of treasure, which was, horror of horrors, "educational...
...Wishbone is a dog who knows and loves great literature...
...A retelling in any medium can stimulate someone's checking out the original...
...After the Bobbseys cracked the case, the statuette would make a heralded return to a Mexican museum...
...Bits of information cropping up in, say, a children's novel reemerge years later as hooks onto which more knowledge can be hung...
...Perhaps this made better Bobbsey sense, but it violated my pet notion about how young children often begin to acquire "high culture" (which I assume to be a good thing...
...They wanted something "fun" for girls (the primary readers)—like jewelry...
...Did Charles and Mary Lamb really destroy anyone's appetite for Shakespeare...
...Apparently kids—from ages five through eleven—love the show...
...No parody, no spoof...
...Given my educational impulses in middlegrade fiction, my latest gig—books based on a public-television series called Wishbone—has been heavenly...
...For the treasure, I devised a gold Aztec statuette— priceless, potent, and ruthlessly pilfered...
...then he literally throws himself into the story...
...Probably no more than a few hooks—the equivalent of an engaging reference to Titian and Vermeer—which help to reel in the fullscale experience...
...I'd say no for several reasons...
...The show, now starting its third season, also includes stories from African-American, Native-American, Latin-American, and Eastern traditions...
...Moreover, think how many times we've all bought the book after we've seen the movie...
...An entire publishing niche exists for new editions of already published works tied to movie releases...
...For me, at age eight, some of the best hooks came from a Bobbsey-type series about a girl named Maida...
...But one friend wondered if seeing an episode would result in children not reading the real literature because they already knew the story...
...Kids commonly read books they like more than once...
...Wishbone gives some factual information about each work and its author...
...In each half-hour episode, he imagines himself as the protagonist in a fully costumed dramatization of a favorite work—Faust, Don Quixote, The Tempest, The Odyssey...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
