At the moment the Mystery genre is getting a lot of love from everyone from middle school to adult and a lot of great books are being released. Since we’re in a middle/high school library I wanted to showcase the mystery books that are not too spicy / intense. In our G8 core library we have “We were liars” and “The Naturals” which is probably at the upper level particularly in the later books in the series.
Along the lines of the work I did a couple of years back on Dystopian Fiction, I started to work on doing the same for sub-genres of Mystery. This time around I didn’t have some flowchart work others had already prepared to riff-off and I wanted to focus particularly on books suitable for middle school. I’ve relied on the excellent sub-genre descriptions of Mark Eleyat (who also has great pages on other genres and subgenres) and tried to make some kind of a flow to it. Somehow so many other things have intervened so it’s taken months to get to this point. I would love some feedback / suggestions for improvement on the flowchart.
And I’ve created these Middle School posters. The Canva Template is available for you to adapt to your situation – one day I hope to be able to expand it for YA and even adult, as I’m personally a big mystery/thriller. If you create anything based on this for YA or adult please feel free to share in a comment.
When my kids were very little, we lived in Spain, and since there wasn’t a local kindergarten, we’d drive about 30 minutes to the closest (Spanish) kindergarten and during that drive I’d have them listen to the wonderful Naxos collections. Besides learning about famous composers, great scientists and a bunch of other stories like Professor Branestawm who they could never get enough of, they also got a diet of Fairytales from Grimm, Andersen and Myths and Legends including Greek, Norse and Heroes and Heroines from Classic Tales. Neither of them remember much about living in Spain, and my daughter swears high and low she can’t speak a word of Spanish (despite 2 years immersion in it) but they remember the stories. And I still have the CDs. Perhaps as we continued to play them in the car on holidays and in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Today I’ve been making a poster of fractured fairytales in the fantasy genre. In a multi-cultural environment you can’t take for granted that students would have been exposed to some or even any of the tales that their educators grew up on, and I also did a bit of research on the types of (Western) fairytale collectors, editors and scribes and found this great little blog on some I was not aware of, or vaguely knew. When you look at the poster you can see the prolific Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm feature a lot (with over 200 tales and 10 children’s legends) as well as Hans Cristian Andersen’s 156 stories and Charles Perrault with his 8 Mother Goose tales punches above his weight in terms of retellings (thanks to Disney).
One of the most fantastic retellings ever of Little Red Riding Hood has to be the book “Picture this by Molly Bang” where she explains elements of Design using the tale. It’s one of the first books I buy in every library I work, if it’s not already on the shelves. Even if you ignore every other book in this post – that’s one to make sure you have in your collection!
As a parting note, as I was saying these are definitely a “western” view of fairy tales, when I was working at UWCSEA East with Katie Day and Maya Thiagarajan one of the amazing things they worked on was helping students recognise the “foundational texts” of their cultures. These are the texts that shape the culture and literature of that culture and that if you’ve not had the opportunity to access that text you may find it hard to read other works from that region because you’re not aware of the references, directly or indirectly. So for Western European culture it would be Aesop, Grimm and Anderson’s fairy tales, the Bible, Shakespeare, Austin etc. In India it would be the The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, in China it would be Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West. Students were tasked with researching their cultural legacies and this is the libguide (thanks to webarchive) that was co-created with their IB literature class. But that’s a poster and discussion for another time.
Our G6 students are currently studying Ancient Greece and will soon be embarking on a week long “week without walls” trip around Greece. Besides our nonfiction books on the City States and other aspects of Ancient Greece here are some more titles the “riff on the theme”.
Of course an easy hit are those around the Greek Myths, and yesterday and today I went to the social studies classes and with a trolley full of Greek Myth books, in particular the multiple copies we have of the 12 George O’Connor Olympians series and each student could check a book out. Not depicted on the poster but one of my absolute favourites series are the “Brick Books” where various classic tales are depicted with Lego Bricks. Unfortunately many of the series are now out of print, but in previous libraries I’ve had the full set of Shakespeare plays, fairy tales etc.
When I wrote the series of blogs in December for GLLI many people asked about displays so I remembered to take a picture of a couple of our displays of last week. We have two main spaces downstairs for display, one as you walk into the library and one against the wall. So one was dedicated to ancient Greece and the other to our Ecosystems projects.
How easy it is to slip back into slothfulness – after a month of posting over at GLLI, today’s the first time I have had both the mindspace and timespace to do something on my own blog. Reading through various FB librarian spaces it seems that Romance is still doing the rounds and people are still looking for good, age appropriate romance novels that the parent-police / rabid-anti-readers / censors whatever are not going to object to, so I spent a few hours this week trying to find as many romance books as possible on Mackin.com that are rated respectively Grade 6+, Grade 7+ and Grade 8+. Now for all of you non-educators, non ex-parents of teenagers, non-working with teens people the distinction may appear ridiculous. But believe me, a 10/11 year old Grade 6 child is developmentally and emotionally ready for something quite different to a 13/14 year old. Or at least some of them / their parents and others that try to police their thoughts and reading.
I say this as an adult who has recently read “The Memory Police” by Yōko Ogawa and translated by Stephen Snyder and as a GenXer whose reading was not policed, except perhaps for “The Godfather” which my parents considered too violent, and therefor like every teen in my school read the whole sordid “Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews series” before we really fully understood what incest was all about (an aside – read this Atlantic Article about just how prevalent it was / is).
I am also living in a region where even a mention of kissing could be construed as scandalous, but with students from all sorts of parenting, cultural, religious, regional, national and linguistic backgrounds. So tightrope, people. Tightrope. While doing my research I really had to wonder what exactly was the criteria to distinguish between suitability of the various age / grade boundaries. And I’m still wondering. There is a lot of talk about the age of the protagonists and whether or not there is kissing, hand holding, other touching, sexual encounters that are graphic or non-graphic or just hinted at but nada on where the lines are.
Back to library-land – why Mackin.com – well, unlike Follett which has very broad categorisation = Grades 3-6 / 5-8, 7-10 and YA, they are a little more granular so I poured over lists and lists of romance books and came up with the posters below. Also bear in mind these are inasmuch as I am aware all heterosexual in nature, again due to where I am living and trying to breathe and exist.
In another time and space I hope to have a far more inclusive list. And read my disclaimers below on this post. There is some nice cross-over in genres as well, getting into sport / fantasy / historical fiction with a brushing of romance – very important for our male-type patrons who are more likely to entertain the thought of romance in the context of anything but realistic fiction.
Disclaimer:The views, opinions, and thoughts expressed in this blog post are solely my own and do not reflect the positions, policies, or opinions of any current or former employer. Any references or examples provided are intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as endorsements or official statements from any organization I have been associated with.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 