Child Novel

[Maren Ruminski]

Myfirst reaction was empathy for the mom, knowing that she probably felt the weight of judgment from everyone around her for even allowing her kid in the basket in the first place. But as she consoled her screaming child, a story started washing over me.

When it happened to us, it changed everything I knew about life. I went into a deep, dark depression and had a hard time caring for my living children, or even myself. My once clean house became a pit. The demise of my marriage accelerated (we were already having problems), and we divorced soon after.

When I started writing, I really tried to make the characters completely different from myself. But it felt untrue. Writing this book was like therapy to me, and when I tried to change things too much, it felt inauthentic.

I also grappled with how certain people would react to what I had written, especially as the series continued. There are some things that are very pointed, and if certain people read it, they will recognize some details. I had to somewhat distance myself from the story, in a way, to have the courage to write and not edit out certain scenes.

But this also applies to those dark feelings of loss, the shame of a situation, or an identity we feel stuck in. Realities can evolve with time, and healing happens when we allow those around us to help see us through.

Beyond writing, Crissi is an avid bookworm and a weight training wannabe. She pulls her inspiration from the ocean, and breathes freely among redwoods. She lives in Northern California with her husband and their blended family of three kids.

Both 35-year-old Jill and 16-year-old Maddie fall victim to their personal circumstance, succumbing to a life neither of them plans for herself. But a brief encounter between the two of them forces the path of their lives to change course, offering light to their despair, and setting a journey where hope leads the way.

Need a speaker for your event? Colleen regularly speaks to writers and other creative groups on a number of topics, including productivity, author platform, self-doubt, taking smart risks, finishing your projects, and more.

Hogwash, says Stephen King. Poppycock. Men read. In fact, King suggested a name for the kind of books we men typically devour. Manfiction. And the best example of manfiction, says King, is Lee Child and his Jack Reacher novels.

But among these hundreds of thousands of selfless soldiers is the occasional careerist, the officer who seeks power, the man who dreams of becoming a general and squashing those under him simply because he can. Jack Reacher refers to these men as (pardon my French) assholes.

The Enemy is the eighth Jack Reacher novel, but unlike most, it takes place while Reacher is still in the military, or more specifically just as the Berlin Wall is coming down at the beginning of 1990.

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader, from picture books for the very young to young adult fiction.

Children's literature can be traced to traditional stories like fairy tales, that have only been identified as children's literature in the eighteenth century, and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the fifteenth century much literature has been aimed specifically at children, often with a moral or religious message. Children's literature has been shaped by religious sources, like Puritan traditions, or by more philosophical and scientific standpoints with the influences of Charles Darwin and John Locke.[2] The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" because many classic children's books were published then.

In the nineteenth century, a few children's titles became famous as classroom reading texts. Among these were the fables of Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine and Charles Perraults's 1697 Tales of Mother Goose.[20] The popularity of these texts led to the creation of a number of nineteenth-century fantasy and fairy tales for children which featured magic objects and talking animals.[20]

Another influence on this shift in attitudes came from Puritanism, which stressed the importance of individual salvation. Puritans were concerned with the spiritual welfare of their children, and there was a large growth in the publication of "good godly books" aimed squarely at children.[11] Some of the most popular works were by James Janeway, but the most enduring book from this movement, still read today, especially in modernised versions, is The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan.[21]

Hornbooks also appeared in England during this time, teaching children basic information such as the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer.[22] These were brought from England to the American colonies in the mid-seventeenth century.

The modern children's book emerged in mid-18th-century England.[26] A growing polite middle-class and the influence of Lockean theories of childhood innocence combined to create the beginnings of childhood as a concept. In an article for the British Library, professor MO Grenby writes, "in the 1740s, a cluster of London publishers began to produce new books designed to instruct and delight young readers. Thomas Boreman was one. Another was Mary Cooper, whose two-volume Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book (1744) is the first known nursery rhyme collection. But the most celebrated of these pioneers is John Newbery, whose first book for the entertainment of children was A Little Pretty Pocket-Book."[27]

In Switzerland, Johann David Wyss published The Swiss Family Robinson in 1812, with the aim of teaching children about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance. The book became popular across Europe after it was translated into French by Isabelle de Montolieu.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" was published in 1816 in a German collection of stories for children, Kinder-Mrchen.[37] It is the first modern short story to introduce bizarre, odd and grotesque elements in children's literature and thereby anticipates Lewis Carroll's tale, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.[38] There are not only parallels concerning the content (the weird adventures of a young girl in a fantasy land), but also the origin of the tales as both are dedicated and given to a daughter of the author's friends.

Literature for children had developed as a separate category of literature especially in the Victorian era, with some works becoming internationally known, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Another classic of the period is Anna Sewell's animal novel Black Beauty (1877). At the end of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, author and illustrator Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter went on to produce 23 children's books and become very wealthy. A pioneer of character merchandising, in 1903 she patented a Peter Rabbit doll, making Peter the first licensed character.[42][43] Michael O. Tunnell and James S. Jacobs, professors of children's literature at Brigham Young University, write, "Potter was the first to use pictures as well as words to tell the story, incorporating coloured illustration with text, page for page."[44]

Rudyard Kipling published The Jungle Book in 1894. A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood. In the latter years of the 19th century, precursors of the modern picture book were illustrated books of poems and short stories produced by English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway. These had a larger proportion of pictures to words than earlier books, and many of their pictures were in colour. Some British artists made their living illustrating novels and children's books, among them Arthur Rackham, Cicely Mary Barker, W. Heath Robinson, Henry J. Ford, John Leech, and George Cruikshank. In the 1890s, some of the best known fairy tales from England were compiled in Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales, including Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, Jack the Giant Killer and Tom Thumb.[45]

The Kailyard School of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan (1904), presented an idealised version of society and brought fantasy and folklore back into fashion. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children's classic The Wind in the Willows and the Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell's first book, Scouting for Boys, was published. Inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel The Secret Garden (1910) was the Great Maytham Hall Garden in Kent. While fighting in the trenches for the British Army in World War I, Hugh Lofting created the character of Doctor Dolittle, who appears in a series of twelve books.

The Golden Age of Children's Literature ended with World War I. The period before World War II was much slower in children's publishing. The main exceptions in England were the publications of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne in 1926, the first Mary Poppins book by P. L. Travers in 1934, The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937, and the Arthurian The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White in 1938.[46] Children's mass paperback books were first released in England in 1940 under the Puffin Books imprint, and their lower prices helped make book buying possible for children during World War II.[47] Enid Blyton's books have been among the world's bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Blyton's books are still enormously popular and have been translated into almost 90 languages. She wrote on a wide range of topics including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives and is best remembered today for her Noddy, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, and The Adventure Series.[48] The first of these children's stories, Five on a Treasure Island, was published in 1942.

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