First, a tangent: anyone who has spent time grappling with the Common Core (CC) English Language Arts standards knows that they have significantly raised the stakes on text complexity. Books that, say, we once thought were a challenging choice for fifth graders are now considered appropriate for fourth graders.

Why has the bar been raised, even though, just a few years ago, No Child Left Behind focused on kids who read below the old, less demanding, grade-level standards?

A key reason is that the metrics for upper YA titles—the types of books that teens have been assigned as the ultimate high school challenge—are 200 Lexile points below what high school seniors will be facing the following year in college. If K–12 education is a fire truck ladder, then we’ve built it too short to reach the escape window. In order to make sure that students are prepared for college, we needed to add more rungs to the ladder.

CC increases the text complexity so much that by kids’ final year in high school there are, as far as I know, no YA nonfiction books that meet the new education guidelines. To remedy that situation, students must necessarily read adult books, primary sources, or academic books. Fine. So if that’s where we’re leading students, how do we get them there?

An adult history book assumes that the reader already knows—or can know, or should know—something about the topic. If, for instance, a writer talks about the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts in a biography of John Adams, he assumes that the reader has studied them in school or can quickly Google them. The author’s job is to give an engaging take on what the passage of those bills tell us about Adams, and how this fresh perspective helps us see Adam’s time, and perhaps our own, in a new light. Since the reader knows the basic information, the originality is in the author’s thinking and presentation, and a source note may simply list where he got the primary source.

YA and academic books, though, have different goals. Books for young readers don’t presume our audience already knows the story. Indeed, even as we’re presenting what we hope is an enticing view of either an unfamiliar event (such as the race to make the first atom bomb or the outbreak of an 18th-century Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia), or a familiar one (like the Great Depression or the 1963 March on Washington), we need to make sure that our readers understand both the basics and our new take. We have to treat the information itself as potentially new to them. This puts those of us who write for young adults in the same place as an academic historian, since he or she is presenting original research that’s aimed at shifting how we view the past.

Thus we, like the academic historian, need to let our readers into the process: Where does our information come from? Are there other perspectives? Are our sources reliable? We can’t presume that our readers have the necessary background, so we need to provide them with it; that’s why our citations need to be annotated. We need to show kids how our claims, our knowledge, are cooked.

Authors who merely cite sources without discussing them are seeing YA history as using a story to pass along settled information. This is appealing to fiction fans, who enjoy the narrative flow of a nonfiction book (and are thrilled that it doesn’t resemble a textbook), but for whom the information is the medicine which the spoonful of narrative sugar makes palatable. Not being familiar with either the content or the way that historians construct knowledge, they don’t miss what they don’t know. Those who question, discuss, and compare their sources see YA history as using a story to acquaint readers with the process of how knowledge is created. This is at the heart of historical writing, but may be totally unfamiliar to fiction readers, who often enjoy speculating about character and motivation in novels, but may have never learned that the same kind of thinking must be applied to our understanding of the real world.

I think annotated citations are great even for kids in the youngest grades, because we want them to be pestering us, demanding that we explain “How do you know that?” But by the upper-middle grades and certainly by high school this is no longer a choice. Our books are always as much about the construction of knowledge as about the information itself. To put it a different way, our highest goal isn’t merely that history should read like a novel, but that it should be as much of a puzzle as a math problem and as open to interpretation as a poem.

“Well-written” in nonfiction necessarily means “well-considered.” History is, ultimately, an invitation to the reader to participate in the process of thinking about, and thus re-imagining, who we are and how we got that way. That is what college offers. We can only make the link by sharing our process of discovery with our younger readers.

Coda: Right now, a related debate is going on among prominent historians and history educators. Stanford’s Sam Wineburg recently wrote a marvelous critique of Howard Zinn’s work—featuring his poor use of sources, which was then criticized by NYU’s Robert Cohen. For my take on the debate, with links to the Wineburg essay, see http://nonfictionandthecommoncore.blogspot.com/2013_01_01_archive.html; and for Cohen’s critique, visit http://hnn.us/articles/when-assessing-zinn-listen-voices-teachers-and-students.

Listen to Karen Cushman introduce and read from Will Sparrow’s Road

Author Karen Cushman is no stranger to the medieval and Renaissance world. Her first novel, the Newbery Honor book Catherine Called Birdy (1994), examined the period from the perspective of a noble-born girl waiting to be married off, who feels frustrated by her limited role in society. Though Cushman’s latest work, Will Sparrow’s Road (November 2012; Gr 5-8, both Clarion), is set during 16th-century England, its title character lives a life that Birdy could only “[fantasize] about as she sat inside embroidering.” Bold and impetuous, Will Sparrow does whatever he must to survive. After being sold to an innkeeper by his father, the boy narrowly escapes a fate as a chimney sweep. Later, he stumbles upon a fairground where he works for a charlatan and a magician before joining up with a traveling sideshow of oddities that features a dwarf, the preserved body of a mermaid, and—strangest of all—Grace Wyse, a girl whose hirsute countenance resembles that of a cat. In this story of a young boy’s journey, Cushman immerses fans of historical fiction in the vibrant, stimulating world of the Renaissance fair.

You’ve written several books set during Medieval and Renaissance England. What compels you to return to this setting so often?

My fascination with this time period has been around for years. I started long ago with Anya Seton and Rosemary Sutcliff and progressed through medieval music and fairs, and collecting things like the 15th-century illuminated manuscript page that hangs on my wall. My father’s family is Polish, my mother’s German and Irish, so the English were certainly never heroes to either side of the family. But somehow England, the England of long ago, spoke to me.

Renaissance fairs, as recreated these days, are tremendous fun, with their period costumes, flowery “Milady”-laden language, drinking mugs, and roasted turkey legs. These events, alive with music and dance, archers and knights on horseback, are based on the traditional ones of medieval and Renaissance England, equally colorful, raucous, and outrageous. I thought it might be an interesting setting for a book.

Then while researching broadsides and ballads for Alchemy and Meggy Swann (Clarion, 2010), I discovered an odd but popular genre of broadsides—those illustrating birth defects, or, to use the language of the time, monstrous births, both human and animal. Such anomalies were often displayed at these spectacles and, presto, the two ideas came together as Will Sparrow joins a troupe of “oddities and prodigies” traveling from fair to fair in Elizabethan England.

In your author’s note, you mention that though you ordinarily write female characters, a girl would not have survived long on her own during this period. Was it a challenge to create a male protagonist?

I think the times were still brutal enough that a girl traveling alone would have been in grave danger. And in a world with so little privacy, I do not believe she could effectively disguise herself as a boy. So Will Sparrow was born. It was indeed a challenge to try and get inside the skin of a boy. In my first attempts I fear Will was more like a girl who wore pants and spat. It took a lot of observation and research before I could come up with what I hope is a not a stereotype but a realistic boy.

How much did gender shape the story? Will Sparrow’s Road has a very animated, lively tone, whereas Catherine Called Birdy evidences a more cloistered feel.

I’m not surprised that Catherine Called Birdy has a more cloistered feel. The lives of young women in medieval England were much more circumscribed and rigid than the life a young male would enjoy. It was important to me to build a world for both Birdy and Will that was honest and believable, true to their character, their gender, and the times.

Over the course of the novel, Will is sold to an innkeeper by his father, makes theft a regular habit, and often goes hungry. Is it freeing to write historical fiction, where you can place your young protagonists in far more dangerous situations than in books set during the present?

I fear some children today face situations just as dangerous as those of the past. What historical fiction does free me to do is to write about children alone, on their own, with no one responsible for them. There were no orphan homes or social workers or Child Protective Services. The options for a homeless child were dismal. Writing about children of long ago allowed me to explore the idea of being entirely on one’s own. I think young readers (and many of us older folks) are intrigued by the idea of who we are as individuals separate from our families, from our homes, from any adult help. What would we do if left to our own devices? How would we survive? Would we be whiny victims or resourceful and courageous? Would we be the same people we are now or would we grow to be different? What kind of family might we create for ourselves?

Will initially views Grace Wyse, the girl with the “face of a cat,” as monstrous but comes to realize that she is fully human. Would someone of the period be able to look beyond Grace’s appearance?

Grace Wyse was inspired by the portrait of Antonietta Gonzales on the cover of The Marvelous Hairy Girls (Yale University Press, 2009) by Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Antonietta, her father, and most of her brothers and sisters suffered from hypertrichosis, an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. There have been 50 documented cases worldwide since the 16th century. The Gonzales family is probably the most famous because of the number of paintings, books, and medical case histories that feature them. Unlike most people marked with such irregularities, the family was not shunned or mocked; dressed in ruffs and elaborate jewel-trimmed gowns, they were welcome visitors in the courts of Europe, though sometimes treated more like pets than people.

Most “oddities and prodigies” would have had a much more difficult existence than the Gonzales family. Few people were accepting of those who were different, who were often considered cursed, marked by the devil, or punished by God. Even physical disabilities called for abuse as Meggy Swann with her crooked legs learned. Will Sparrow was fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time with Grace and so get to know the person behind her extraordinary appearance.

TeachingBook.net resources on this interview »»»

Listen to Karen Cushman introduce and read from Will Sparrow’s Road

Hunter was born in East Lothian, Scotland, in 1922. As a child, she loved books and the Scottish countryside, both of which would later influence her as an author. Though she left school at 14 to help support her family after her father’s death, Hunter continued to educate herself through night school and libraries. It was in the National Library that she first encountered the Scottish folk tales that would feature so heavily in her work.

Her first book, Patrick Kentigern Keenan (Blackie, 1963) (currently published under the title The Smartest Man in Ireland), originally began as stories she made up for her two sons.

Hunter’s books for young adults were generally historical fiction set in Scotland, while her work for children consisted of fantasy and often involved Celtic folklore. Her novel The Kelpie’s Pearls (Funk & Wagnalls, 1964) addressed the myth of the kelpie, a water horse that lures riders into the water to their deaths.

Similarly, in A Stranger Came Ashore (Harper & Row, 1975), a 12-year-old boy suspects that a man staying with his family may be a selkie, or a seal that assumes human form on land according to Scottish legend. Hunter received the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation for the novel, and School Library Journal named it one of its Best Children’s Books.

In 1974, she published The Stronghold (Harper & Row), a Carnegie award-winning novel set in first-century Scotland written from the point of view of a teenager whose tribe is staving off Roman invaders. In The King’s Swift Rider: A Novel on Robert the Bruce (HarperCollins, 1998), Hunter wrote about Scotland’s struggle for freedom from England in the 14th century. The novel was named an ALA Popular Paperback in 2002, and School Library Journal praised it, saying that Hunter “provided a powerful sense of a very different place and time.”

Though best known for her novels, Hunter also taught writing and children’s literature. In 1975, she received the Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award, an honor given annually by the Association for Library Service to Children to an outstanding author, critic, librarian, or teacher. Hunter also lectured throughout the United States that year and in New Zealand the following year.

In addition to her more than 20 fiction books for children and young adults, Hunter published Talent Is Not Enough: Mollie Hunter on Writing for Children (Harper & Row, 1976), a book of five essays based on her lectures in the United States. She explored topics ranging from folklore and fairy tales to children’s book authors’ obligation to truly understand their readers. She also taught writing workshops to both children and adults and served as a writer-in-residence at Dalhousie University in the early 1980s.