Martha and I are teaching a class–that is, we are trying to teach a class, which has thus far been cancelled twice due to snow–on reviewing, and we’ve just assigned the students Malinda Lo’s provocative series of essays about reviewing and diversity. You all should take a look, too.

It’s reminding me of a too-brief conversation I had with Nina Lindsay at ALA; while we (reviewers) work as if guided by some kind of objective (as far as possible) criteria, in fact, we’re (essentially) educated middle-class white ladies reviewing for other educated middle-class white ladies.  When we knock books for being “didactic,” for example, we do so as if everyone agrees that didacticism is a bad thing. But that’s not true; it’s simply a critical standard that holds sway on anyone who has studied children’s literature in a graduate library school. The “everyone” who “agrees” is a smaller circle than we pretend. Is it, Nina asked, time to shake up our standards? Thoughts, class?

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