The creators say that we are in need of YA graphic novels! Non-superhero esque, that is. Eva Volin (the librarian on the panel) has the answers… of course the librarian has the answers. Check her out!

Even though it seems like graphic novels have generally been accepted into the greater canon of literary works in their own right, (see graphic novels receiving literary awards previously won by text-only books and a graphic novel presence on recommended reading lists), really we have to get more people to hop on the bandwagon

When your colleagues and customers are hopping on the bandwagon sometimes they do so with skewed views of comics. Graphic novels are NOT just a “gateway to ‘real reading’” as so many people think – they are a valid reading experience in and of themselves. Volin says that she’s actually counted the number of words in a graphic novel and a text-only novel of the same length and found them to be more or less of the same word count. Not to mention the visual literacy involved in reading graphic novels. Some panelists argued, truthfully, that people have no problem with kids reading picture books, which are essentially the same thing, so why all this resistance to comics books? Pictures help readers decode language so to integrate images and words for readers of a certain level, it does a lot more for them in terms of success in reading, rather than a text-only format. I would also argue that graphic novels do what picture books are meant to do, but on visual steroids. Yes – they also provide visual clues to what is going on in the text, but picture books have one image to illustrate what is being described in the text on that page. Graphic novels have, or should have, all sorts of imagery from which the reader can extrapolate meaning from the image alone. This is a wholly different skill that we need to cultivate in our readers.

Graphic novels, especially for children, are at risk of not being published as frequently because they are extremely expensive to publish and also because of scanlation, they are being ripped off via the internet so while they may have a lot of readership, it may have nothing to do with how many copies they actually sell. Stacy King, a YA novelist who also works as the marketing manager for Udon Publishing, (and a friend of mine), actually had to explain this phenomenon to me after the panel was over.  (And I apologize if I mess it up, now…) In the history of manga publishing, it used to be that you had these manga pages in Japanese that people would scan post online and then also have a translated file for each panel so you could read, look, and laugh along.  This became such a big thing with such a dedicated following that now manga lovers have the option of reading pre-translated works (put out by people like Udon). Hooray, right? Well, as the technology has advanced, so has the amount of scanned works that are ripped off as bit torrents and downloaded by children (and everyone else) everywhere! This is problematic for publishers, obviously, but it also is problematic for the creators who are sometimes contracted to write or draw a certain series of graphic novels, but because of the scanlation phenomenon, publishers may choose not continue to produce the work.  I think, this is very obviously where the library comes in. We need to advocate the true value of graphic novels to parents, teachers, and yes, other librarians in our community. We need to make sure we have a wide selection of graphic novels from the commercially popular to the quality (and yes, sometimes they are one and the same). We need to continue to market ourselves as a free service and tell our customers that they don’t need to be dependent on downloading to get what they want to read for free, because … we have it! We also need to teach our customers that downloading is illegal, and hurts a lot of people in the industry of creation. So, in conclusion – Hooray graphic novels! And I will get down off my soapbox, now.

(A big thanks to Toronto Comics Arts Festival (Christopher Butcher in particular), the panelists and moderator for making this possible.)

Twelve is actually a sequel to the book Eleven (bien sur) which introduces us to Winifred “Winnie” Perry, your typical suburban American pre-teenager. Winnie is fairly average: she’s pretty, not wildly intelligent, but smart enough to do well in school (though the academic aspect of her life is barely mentioned). She is, however, incredibly insightful and self-aware for a 12 year old. She analyzes her relationships with her various friends, her family, and her body like a pro, although sometimes she is extremely embarrassed by all three. You can also tell that despite the embarrassment factor, Winnie truly loves and enjoys her family. Her parents are down-to-earth and supportive, and her equally self-aware older sister Sandra is a teen, yes, but a good role model for Winnie. Who, in turn, is a wonderful big sister to 6 year old Ty. She even lets him try on her bras!

From Winnie’s narration at the beginning of the book, if we haven’t read Eleven (and we didn’t), we can assume that during the past year, her best friend, Amanda, has jilted her for the more popular, fashion and girly Gail. Through this social turmoil Winnie struck up a friendship with Dinah, who seems less mature and more fragile than Amanda, but is kinder and a more devoted friend to Winnie. During the course of Twelve, Winnie develops breasts, graduates from sixth grade, gets her ears pierced, attends sleepover summer camp, goes skinny-dipping, starts her period, learns to use tampons, enters the world of junior high school and *gasp* meets a guy! Changing personalities, evolving friendships, developing bodies, and how to be a good person while worrying what the world thinks of you all figure prominently in this novel, as they do in most lives at that age. Sometimes I thought “This is Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret for the digital native age!” but it’s sweet and funny in its own right. Looking back at my own life at that age, (and the sometime trauma it caused me), I was at times very touched by Winnie’s successes, failures and commentary. For a reader who is the same age as Winnie, her experiences will also serve to normalize the sometimes difficult, humiliating, and joyous process of growing up for tweens.

The flow of the book takes the reader from Winnie’s twelfth to thirteenth birthdays. Since Winnie’s birthday is in March, the natural storyline of the book goes from the end of one year of school through the summer and up until the spring of the next year at school. The story itself is not quite a story, it’s more of an internal monologue that can jump hours or days at a time, analyzing all the new life experiences that Winnie’s 12th year has brought her. The novel seems like it’s more of a stream of consciousness or a bulleted list of events than an actual plot.

The setting also tends to change quite a bit and so do the people. There are a lot of characters in this novel, some of which are permanent, some fleeting, some are prevalent in some chapters  of her life (harhar) and completely absent in others. A few provide interesting information about Winnie as a character, but most just seem to be window dressing for the scene. For instance, Winnie meets a whole cabin of girls at Camp Winding Gap, but we as readers hardly ever get to know them and they disappear with in the span of a few pages.  While reading, I was put-off by this laundry list of places and people, each with their own little crisis or situation. When were any of these things going to become really consequential? Amanda, Winnie’s former best friend, returns for a summer of friendship at camp, then all but disappears when Winnie starts school in the fall, only to re-emerge as a goth in the sequel, Thirteen (shhhh!). Except for perfunctory comparisons to Dinah, Amanda is essentially dead to us as readers. Meanwhile, she’s seamlessly replaced by a girl named Cinnamon, who then becomes a friend-fixture in the rest of the novel and the sequel. Perhaps my initially adverse reaction was personal: I like follow-up. I like plot. But, looking back on my own years, I realized that perhaps this is how the book mimics life. The year that bridges elementary and middle or junior high school is one of changing peer groups, schools, and general upheaval. People come and go, we’re introduced to new characters every day, and while there might be story arcs like camp, finding partners, school… it’s just illustrative of a time of great change in our lives. A staggering work of literary genius, perhaps it’s not. But it is a lovely alternative recommendation for the pre-gossip girl in your life.

Programming: I’m still trying to find best practices for programming, but it’s helped a lot that MPL has started conducting programming planning by committee. Also MPL is restructuring the programming itself (more on that later) and ideally this will standardize the programming delivered across the system. I have finally found some one-off programs that have worked, though! Over March Break I ran Very Merry Un-Birthday Party and Pizza Extravaganza and they were a huge success! Well – at least the kids had fun, and I felt distinctly less chaotic and stressed than I did for the Anne of Green Gables program last June. So progress, no?

Collections: I still have a LOT to learn about collection development, but to be honest it’s not as interesting as I thought it would be. I love to read, of course, and you definitely don’t have to twist my arm to read anything in the Juvenile department, but the actual mechanics of knowing what’s what, ordering, reading, weeding, and suggesting… OHhhhhhhh the suggesting, feels like a chore, no doubt. Reader’s advisory still sends me into little tiny butterflies of panic and I tend to suggest books that I’ve read as a child and enjoyed. This might be due to the fact that I abhor the pop-lit that a goodly portion of kids read (Hannah Montana and Pokemon, for example) but more likely it’s because I haven’t yet done the legwork to really learn about reading levels, my collections, popular titles and authors, etc. So – I find I remain fairly ignorant. To remedy – I’ve started on a mission to read more books in my collection. It started off with Neil Gaiman as a compromise of my sensibilites – Coraline and The Graveyard Book (both FANTABULOUS reads – I’m so, so happy he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Graveyard Book!!!). Now I’ve moved on to others, Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things and Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything (both by Lenore Look) were great as well. ALSO Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time by Lisa Yee – the not quite a sequel to Millicent Min, Girl Genius (which won the Sid Fleischman humor award) – was phenomenal. Most recently, but not least – I’ve started reading the Joey Pigza books by Jack Gantos (starting with Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key), having been turned on to him by his novel for adults The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs. Whew… so I’m hoping this will help with my collections knowledge and hopefully I’ll sit down and write proper reviews some day soon…

Management (Time and otherwise): Hahaha… with my wedding (last November) out of the way I’ve gotten marginally better at not being completely rushing around like the proverbial decapitated chicken, but I still have a ways to go. This isn’t really helped by the fact that all job descriptions are currently under review in terms of responsibilities and committee work, etc. BUT it should all be worked out soon and then I’ll have a better idea of how much I need to freak out about various deadlines on a daily basis, haha. People management – still not very good. Because I can’t stand doing it! Especially since the people I’m … well not “managing” per se – but delegating, suggesting, requesting, etc. are mostly a few decades my senior. I just don’t feel comfortable telling people what to do. I even feel like I should be paying the teen volunteers! Argh. Well that’s just my temperament – I’ll work on being bossy this year. Probably…

Story Time: Story times, I think, are my biggest accomplishment of the year. I think I’ve grown a lot as a story teller and a performer, and I think it shows. (The ABC Canada rep said I was one of the best readers of Robert Munsch he had seen this year!!!) I’m definitely not as nervous as I was December 10, 2007 when I gave my very first story time, haha. I was… petrified. I’m an out-in-the-open champ, more or less… and I’ve also just about conquered the Baby Goose Beast, too!  So I guess it’s safe to say it’s taken about a year (a little less) to hit my stride in story time. But there’s always more to learn!!!

So that’s it – my year in review. A little bit of good and a little bit of “needs improvement” – but when are we ever done? We’re 3 months into the next set of adventures in librarianship and we’ll see how it goes!

So, what are people looking for easy readers really looking for? I’d say… levels. In assistance to us, most publishers of “easy readers” have split their books up into various levels of reading development from “see spot run” to full paragraphs of compound words that still retain a certain size of type and no indentation (or so I’ve been led to believe). Usually they number these levels 1-4 – (Frog and Toad fall into about a level 2-3, to give you an idea) – but different publishers have tried to get a jump on the competition by formulating different crafty gimmicks. There’s Green Light Readers from Harcourt, the funnily named “Bananas” series from Crabtree Publishing, and the list goes on. Some have 3 levels, some have 5… some just have colours! So it makes it a little difficult for the ambitious librarian really find crosswalks to make decisions on what colour of banana counts as a Level 3 read, (I personally think it’s Red Bananas, though others may disagree). So this is my project, if the Children’s Services Committee chooses to accept it – making navigating Easy Readers more intuitive for parents and children. We’ll see how that goes.

As a final side note: For older readers just graduated from Easy Readers, the Nibbles, Bites, Chomps series is a good, canned way to help parents guide their kids along the road to reading without much serious readers advisory effort. This recommendation is kid-approved (it was, after all, a kid who brought the series to my attention), and librarian tested.

I’m finding a lot of picturebooks on factual content, that are being catalogued as non-fiction, then are forgotten. I’m thinking of having a display of “Non-Fiction Picture Books”… maybe? That’s the best I can do to increase their visibility, but I think it’s a shame that they’re being cataloged that way. Judging a book by its content, if you will.