Why kids SHOULD read Enid Blyton

When I was ten I went to boarding school. Tucked into the side of my overnight case was my favourite book: Claudine at St Clares by Enid Blyton. But by bedtime, the book was hidden at the back of my drawer ready to be surreptitiously returned home at half-term. Within hours of my arrival, I had discovered that Enid Blyton was banned at my new school. I do not remember ever having this explained to me, and at the time I would certainly not have been able to distinguish between the books which were on offer in the school library and the Enid Blyton books I loved. I simply accepted the ban and carried on reading her books at home with an added frisson of guilty pleasure.

The trouble is, of course, that parents and teachers feel they need to quality-control their children’s reading. Enid Blyton does use dull, repetitive language, and the pervading tone is of talking down to the reader. Blyton’s books are peppered with sexual and racial stereotypes considered unacceptable today (although in modern reprints the publishers have done their best to remove these). And that’s before you get to the whole middle-class thing...

But in spite of all this, and even getting on for half a century since her death, there are plenty of kids who still love Enid Blyton. The language we adults see as uninspiring gives many children their first taste of fluent reading. Because they don’t have to think too hard about what the words mean or how the sentences are structured, they may for the first time experience that feeling of running their eyes over the black squiggles on the page and having them transform into a story in their heads. Allowing kids to discover that they have this amazing, magical skill, is, I think, key to turning them into readers. And there’s a wealth of Blyton to read. With some series fiction, children may be left not knowing what to read next when they’ve finished the series. They may have discovered the fluent reading trick, but their focus has been narrowed. But Blyton’s prolific output means that once a child has discovered her books, he or she may read their way through all manner of stories: adventure, fantasy, family, detective.

So, let them read their fill of Blyton. Chances are they will one day turn round and tell you the books are boring. And you can always speed the process up a bit. Do they read and re-read the Malory Towers and St Clare’s books? So provide them with some other school stories. What about What Katy Did at School (Susan Coolidge) or Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer). Move Famous Five fans onto the Young Bond books by Anthony Horowitz or Robin Stevens fabulous Murder Most Unladylike books. You could introduce Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair fans to E Nesbit.

One word of warning though. Don’t ever, ever read Blyton out loud if there is any way you can possibly avoid it. Aloud, all the banality of the language comes plodding out, and you’ll find no matter what a skilled reader-aloud you are, you just can’t help sounding like a comedian doing an imitation of Enid Blyton.

Oh my, jolly hockey sticks and lashings of ginger beer!

Blyton to relish
The …of Adventure series
Kids go off on adventures in far-flung places. Remember Willard Price’s adventure stories? These are like that with a little less of the shrunken heads and shooting.

Naughty Amelia Jane series
Because everyone wants to believe that their toys get up and mess around when they go out of the room…

Children’s Books – categorizing by age group

This is an information sheet about children’s books which I wrote for the writing group I belong to, intended as an overview for the non-specialist. However, someone else asked me for this information, so here it is, for public consumption.

These categories are of necessity overlapping. Children have very different experiences of learning to read. Their ‘reading age’ may be far above or below their emotional maturity. I’ve divided them up the way you’d be most likely to see them divided in a bookshop or library. Publishers would break these categories into lots of subcategories.

Picture Books

• Some are suitable for children to read alone

• Most designed for an adult and child to share

• Importance of illustration and design; most of the best picture books are co-authored by a writer and illustrator who work closely together

• Many have rhyming texts with plenty of repetition

• There is often a playful use of language which might seem difficult for children to comprehend word for word

• The pictures can usually tell the story by themselves – or expand on the text

• Generally only a few sentences per page; some are wordless

• May contain difficult ideas which adults need to discuss or present to young children, e.g. death, new sibling, potty-training, bullying

• Not necessarily a ‘story’; could be a nonsense rhyme, descriptive or simply words.

Early Readers

• Approx 6 up

• Designed for children beginning to read on their own

• Sentences are very simple, with just one idea per sentence

• In these books the text carries the story rather than the pictures

• Many books in this range form part of a series

• At the younger end, these books have 100 to 2,500 words and each page will have a picture.

• Progresses to books of 3,000 to 15,000 words, divided into short chapters with a picture on most spreads

Middle Grade

• Age 8 to 12

• Word count generally no more than 45,000 words, though fantasy titles may be much longer

• These are the books that are most likely to spring to mind when you think of children’s books

• Generally plot- rather than character-led

• Unusual to have a first-person narrator

• The language varies more than in books for younger readers, but is likely to be simpler in structure and vocabulary than a young adult book

• Feature adventures, comedy, fun

• Unlikely to contain romance, swearing, drugs

• Many of these books feature a child protagonist, but you also find books about adults or animals

• Parents are often absent in these books

• Endings are usually happy

• May feature a series of adventures of a character, so that each chapter is a short story in itself and the book has no overall narrative arc

Young Adult

• Age 12 and up

• Word count generally no more than 70,000 words, but some genres can be much longer

• Tend to focus more on characters and their problems

• Tend to have deeper points of view (often first person) and be more emotional

• May contain material which is considered unsuitable for younger children (drugs, sex) or wouldn’t interest them (romance) or is upsetting

• The language in these books will be as complex as that of an adult novel

• These novels almost exclusively feature a teenage protagonist