Читать книгу Writing Children's Books For Dummies - Peter Economy - Страница 42

You probably remember reading middle-grade fiction and nonfiction books in your childhood. These books were long, detailed, and relatively complex, and they dealt with subject matter that was much more intriguing (and potentially much more divisive) than most children’s picture books. Some classic middle-grade books deal with some weighty issues:

 Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White (HarperCollins): The farmer is about to kill Wilbur, a runt of a pig, before the farmer’s daughter saves him. Wilbur doesn’t get lost, or hidden, or given away, but almost killed! This is big-kid stuff.

 The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (HarperCollins): Delves into death and sickness (physical and emotional), not to mention social class discrepancies.

 The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (Penguin Random House): Filled with word play and complex relationships.

Middle-grade books are often a child’s first peek into the real world in which people die, are irredeemably bad, have to solve real problems, and even fail.