The promotional materials put out by the St. Louis County Library to plug the Arbuthnot Lecture describe the speaker as “our finest living creator of books for young people.”
The staggering praise is for veteran juvenile-lit author Lois Lowry, and, despite the inarguable mootness of such a statement (Maurice Sendak? Louis Sachar? E.L. Konigsburg? Judy Blume? They ain’t too shabby, neither), the encomium is understandable. Before Lowry gives this prestigious annual lecture, she will surely be introduced as the author of many different types of children’s books, for in each subcategory, she has shined.
Her yen for tackling serious issues in books for teens and pre-teens is evidenced in books like A Summer to Die, in which the main character’s sister wastes away from leukemia, and (check the title) dies; Number the Stars, in which a ten-year-old Copenhagen girl and her family shelter a Jew from the Nazis; and the celebrated Giver trilogy, a glimpse at a future society which has prohibited most personal freedoms (and here in St. Louis, the Metro Theater Company for young audiences performed an adaptation of The Giver earlier this year).
The Silent Boy, in particular, rocked my world. This one’s about an autistic kid who winds up uncomprehendingly putting a baby in danger. His fate isn’t pretty. It’s awfully dark, but as childhood psychologists could no doubt tell you, kids mustn’t be patronized. In time, they will find the dark, the forbidden, the adult, regardless of what their parents choose to teach or not to teach them—and often the children will be better for it. Death happens, to dogs, grandmothers, and others, too. Sex happens (to dogs, grandmothers… you get the idea). There are good ways to teach kids about these realities, and they have to learn eventually. Lowry, not unlike Fred “Mister” Rogers, just happens to be extraordinarily skilled at broaching tough topics—far better than most parents, I’d wager.
But of her many talents, it’s Lowry’s knack for LOL lines that moved me to request a ticket for her Friday, April 15 lecture. (It’s now sold out, but she’ll speak again at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 16, at the St. Louis Public Library-Schlalfy Branch. If you go, arrive early; Lowry is immensely popular.)
That winning humor comes through, in particular, in the Anastasia series, about an adolescent girl.
In the first volume in the series, 1979’s Anastasia Krupnik, our girl becomes entranced by the emergence and disappearance of a wart on her own body.
“’Warts, you know,’ her father had told her, ‘have a kind of magic to them. They come and go without any reason at all, rather like elves.’” (In the next volume, Anastasia Again!, she decides leprosy is much more interesting.)
Later in that first book, Lowry dares to mine laughs from “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, in this speech by Anastasia’s teacher:
“’Now if, in geography, I explained to the class just how to draw a map, and someone didn’t listen, and drew his own kind of map’ (everyone glanced at Robert Giannini, who blushed—he had drawn a beautiful map of Ireland, with cartoon figures of people throwing bombs all over it, and had gotten an F.) ‘even though it was a very beautiful map, I would have to give that person a failing grade because he didn’t follow the instructions.’”
But, this is Lois Lowry, where the tragedy and black humor intermingle in lovely ways, and by the end of Anastasia Krupnik, her mom has given birth, and her grandma has given up the ghost.
Check out this exchange, between Anastasia and her dad:
“’It didn’t hurt, did it, when she [Grandma] died?’
‘No,’ said her father. ‘Her heart just stopped beating. She died of old age. Her time for living was simply over.’
‘Like my wart.’”
Kids really do say the darndest things. And Lowry, with that arrow in her quiver, too, can be as funny as George Carlin or Chris Rock—and just as bold.
Of course, she didn’t invent spunky girl characters, by any means. (Here’s looking at you, Ramona Quimby, Eloise, Laura Ingalls, Junie B. Jones, etc., etc.). But in her Anastasia series, Lowry does take a measure of adolescent angst, sibling rivalry, the imperfect nature of parenting, the miseries of old age and other bummers, crafts them into a thoroughly charming tale, and manages to age the main character realistically through no less than nine books published over the course of 16 years.
Whether Lowry is “the finest” children’s author alive is the subject for a pointless debate. But she certainly gets kids. She knows how to negotiate children through a minefield of challenges, even when their parents don’t particularly want them to read her books. And she’s funny as hell.
