Is this really what girls are made of?
Fred Goodwin, CMA
<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/
books/article2240410.ece>
http://tinyurl.com/yupgka
The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls has gone top of the bestseller
list. Isn't it just a blatant rip-off
>From The Sunday Times
August 12, 2007
Rosie Millard
There is a bit of a to-do about the book that has just hit the top of
the nonfiction bestselling list. To its fans, The Great Big Glorious
Book for Girls (Penguin) is a rather wonderful creation - a nice,
comforting volume of holiday-friendly activities that starts off at
needlework and runs through everything girls might like to do,
including a stage faint ("Bend your ankles, bend your knees, and let
yourself go floppy") and, naturally, how to make fairy cakes.
However, to its detractors who have come out in the press, the GBGBG
is not only a "wholly unoriginal" copycat of last year's bestseller,
The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden, but "twee",
"desperate" and written with a tone that "flickers between faux-
naivety and irony".
Both books are written with a Baden-Powellesque slice of old-fashioned
derring-do, but it seems that while advising boys how to tie a reef
knot is good nostalgia, advising girls how to pack a snowball
properly, or do French knitting, is bad nostalgia.
The authors, publisher Rosemary Davidson, an editorial director at
Random House, and journalist Sarah Vine, a beauty editor, are a bit
bemused by all the fuss. "The accusation of retro irony is probably
all my fault," says Vine, 40. "I was aiming at girls aged between
eight and 12, and felt there were lots of things I wanted to talk
about, but couldn't." Indeed the GBGBG, illustrated with winsome pen-
and-ink sketches of girls gathering posies and popping their dollies
on swings is very wholesome indeed. "No, we didn't include anything in
there like bras or periods," says Vine, who has a two-year-old son and
a four-year-old daughter. "It was meant to be the sort of book filled
with fun things to do, which takes you out of your mad, modern
living."
But the girls aged 8-12 that I know rather like mad, modern living, I
suggest. Their bookshelves are full of knowing volumes by the likes of
Jacqueline Wilson who includes story lines about divorce, childcare
issues and alcoholism in her bestsellers, not to mention families on
the run.
The Brownie pack I help with is full of bright girls who are just as
interested in rude jokes as they are in playing sleeping lions.
Sleeping lions is in the GBGBG, but no rude jokes. "I wanted to put in
more grown-up things," counters Vine, "but Penguin wanted it to be
nostalgic and uncomplicated."
And pretty aspirational too, it seems, with chapters about owning your
own pony and an introduction to Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung
San Suu Kyi and the nine daughters of Zeus. Surely the market aimed at
is pushy middle-class mothers not the average 10-year-old who might
prefer to know more about the outrageous Louise Rennison (creator of
Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging) than Virginia Woolf (creator
of Mrs Dalloway).
"Well, you write about what you are able to write about. I wouldn't
dream of patronising a demographic that I wouldn't know, or
understand," says Vine, very politely. "The whole idea was to
recapture some of those great 1950s books for children - to have a bit
of that lost spirit of childhood."
Why is the tone, though, so fey? Take the section on throwing, which
begins, "It's a myth that girls can't throw. It's just that boys are
generally better at it because they have been practising since they
were first able to pick things up." Maybe the nudge-nudge quality is
because the original idea seems to have sprung from something rather
close to a joke.
"When The Dangerous Book for Boys came out and was such a hit," says
Vine, "I was asked to do a spoof girls' version for a newspaper, and
wrote a rather silly, jolly piece including things like how to have a
sulk. That's why this book came about. Anyway, I think the writing is
characterful, not anodyne."
To be fair, my 10-year-old daughter has been champing at the bit to
read the book since it arrived yesterday, and has already made hummus
from the recipe in the cooking section. "This book is not meant to be
a postfeminist critique of girlhood," Vine continues. "It is not
politically correct, because I am not a PC person. Needlecraft is not
an offence to the female sex. None of our sex is enslaved by
needlecraft!"
Her co-author Rosemary Davidson, 42, who is also the mother of two, is
as intrigued, although a bit less defensive, about why the book has
caused such a kerfuffle. "I'm really interested in why it is being
attacked in the way it is," she tells me.
"It is clearly a response to The Dangerous Book for Boys. However,
while it is clearly okay to endorse, or celebrate macho ideals - as
Dangerous does - I do wonder whether girls should be genderless.
Glorifying boyhood is good, but it is somehow wrong to know how to
make a doll. I don't think it's wrong to want to make a doll. And I
think knowing how to unblock a toilet [a particularly criticised
section] is quite useful."
Still, the fuss doesn't seem to have impeded the book's ascent up the
bestselling chart. What, I ask Davidson, can be next? "I hear that
there is a Dangerous Book for Dogs about to come out . . . I think it
is a spoof, actually," she adds, reassuringly.