is her debut novel and was released on May 1, 2010. Leah is posting today about books from your childhood that have had even greater significance as adults.When my eighth grade class was reading Animal Farm, our teacher told us that her nine-year-old had just read and enjoyed the same book. She told us there was no contradiction; the book that could be enjoyed by a fourth-grader as a simple story about anthropomorphized pigs could also be taught to an eight grade class, who could understand it on a metaphorical level that the nine-year-old wouldn’t necessarily be ready for.
The same is true of some less famous works that aren’t as explicitly meant to be read on two levels. One example is one of my favorite books of all time, Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. It was originally classified as mid-grade, I believe, and I read it for the first time when I was about ten years old. I enjoyed it, but I recall being faintly puzzled by parts of it; and it certainly wasn’t, at the time, my favorite of Diana Wynne Jones’ books – it wasn’t even competition for the Cherstomanci books, or The Ogre Downstairs, or Howl’s Moving Castle.
Then I picked it up again as an adult, and I was blown away. There are just so many things to love about this book, an incredibly original tale about Sirius, an immortal creature who is unjustly sentenced to life in a dog’s body on earth. There is the subtle and powerful use of mythology, as when he joins the Wild Hunt. There is the heartwrenching story of his owner, a girl named Kathleen suffering under prejudice and exploitation. There is the humor (the scene where Sirius acted stupid for the benefit of a policeman had me helpless with laughter). At the center of the book is the poignant love story between a girl and her dog. And best of all, to me, is the sly and incisive commentary about blindness in relationships; from Kathleen’s foster father, who refrains from seeing problems unless they make him uncomfortable, and tries to make up for it by random and inadequate acts of kindness, to the main character Sirius, who can be more observant about people as a simple puppy than as a sophisticated immortal.
This is one of the reasons I’m so happy about the growing strength and breadth of the young adult genre; because it makes a new place for stories like Dogsbody – a 65,000-word funny, poignant book about an elemental turned into a dog and a middle-school aged girl. It makes a place for books that probably would never be published as adults books, but that aren’t really children’s books either. Recently I was at Borders, and I was delighted to see Diana Wynne Jones’ books shelved in the young adult section. It is, I think, where they’ve always belonged.
Dogsbody isn’t the only book of this type. Many other old favorites spring to mind. Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief, Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Daughter of the Nile, and L.J. Smith’s The Night of the Solstice, to name just a few. Any other recommendations? What other childhood tales work even better when read as an adult?
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and all the Lassie movies, very impressive).
However, I took a few detours along the way to becoming a full-time writer. After selling my first story ("Temple of Stone") while in high school, I gave in to my mother's importuning to be practical and majored in biology at Brooklyn College. I then went to Columbia Law School and practiced law for almost two years at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, a large law firm in New York City. I kept writing and submitting in my spare time, and finally, a mere 15 years after my first short story's acceptance, I am a published novelist. I am very excited about this!
I live in Brookline, Massachusetts (right outside of Boston), with my husband and our two daughters.
