I said that last week's #ReadItTorial would probably be my last, but I didn't really want to write a final one on a sour note.

Most of last week's #ReadItTorial was pretty damming and I had a lot of time to reflect on what I'd written, and also a lot of time to consider that the problem may be widespread amongst larger multinational publishers (the problem being of publishers 'hanging on' to best-selling authors and samey 'safe' themes and story types) but it's definitely not the case amongst small print run independents.

This is the weird thing for me, as a complete outsider to the industry with no real direct line of contacts within, just an outsider's observatory view of the way it all seems to 'work' and the frustration of how it's becoming stagnant.

I'd expect indie publishers to be more risk averse - ie less prone to taking chances on titles that may end up having a fairly narrow audience. Yet it doesn't seem to be the case, in fact indies seem to be the sole hope I have that the industry won't collapse in on itself.

Last night, while in the throes of insomnia (which I suffer from regularly) my mind was churning over the whole problem, and also likening it to what happened in the late 80s and early 90s in the music industry. Back then (and in some ways it's going through it a bit now as well) the charts were dominated by hits from large record companies, often dreadful over-produced tat, or reissued classic songs sung and performed by folk you'd rather run through a wall of fishhooks to get away from than hear ruining a song you previously loved.

When I was a moody youngster I started trawling through record shops looking for more obscure stuff (yeah everyone loves to think that they're so 'edgy' that they listen to stuff that no one else has ever heard of or likes) and it struck me that this feels a little bit like what's going on in children's publishing at the moment.

As a particular trend emerges, the big publishers press-gang their 'chosen' writers to knock out a few titles based on that trend. We've seen it again and again over the course of blogging about children's books for the last ten years, and I sometimes feel that the various book fairs are to blame - almost like the biggies go round the fair, look at what everyone else is doing and then churn out their own versions or variants of those books.

Mighty girls, books about plastics in the ocean, books about anxiety and mindfulness, books about race issues and equality - these are all vital subjects of interest to kids, and yet whenever one hits the news or becomes a high-profile subject for protest or media coverage, the books seep out like woodlice crawling out of a piece of rotting wood until your local bookstore is utterly and completely saturated with them, and kids (and their book-buying parents) are left with little or no clue which is worth spending their money on.

In some ways this does actually prop up the argument that there isn't enough official review coverage of kidlit, certainly not enough critical coverage that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title. Amazon reviews and Goodreads (held up by most book folk as the only yardstick to measure a book's worth by, just let that roll around in your head for a moment or two) have now become where most consumers will look for a book's worthiness (I've lost count of the amount of times we've said no to folk who've asked us to 'double up' our reviews by writing them on both of these too - what on earth would be the point in trying to run a blog if you're just going to put the same review up in two other places as well - let alone the time it would take to do so).

OK I promised a way out of the mire. Perhaps some of these ideas would work, or are at least more worthy of debate. Some may even exist so don't be shy in pointing out what I'm missing if I'm missing it - after all I'm just a dad writing about books with his daughter on an increasingly part time basis, my knowledge extends to what you see in this blog.

1) A site that captures a whole slew of reviews, ratings and opinions on books. I'm thinking something that is the booky equivalent of gamerankings - something that brings together reviews and perhaps even a rated percentage. I once considered doing this but realised that as a one man band it'd end up being a huge undertaking. I know a few sites (like the awesome Toppsta) do get close to providing a good broad range of reviews but would love to see something that, say, trawled the top 100 book blogs and worked out a percentage rating based on opinions on reviews (the only problem there is that most bloggers - like us - don't give books marks out of 5 or anything).

2) Be more risk averse. Particularly larger publishers. Consider that you might feel that a book might only have a niche audience, but with the right coverage and promotion even niche titles can become massively popular (stuff promoting celebrity books or books by long established authors who really
don't need hyping)

3) Cast your net wider than the usual suspects. One of the reasons I included a Gecko Press title in the header image for this article is that over the years they've done an excellent job in translating and bringing in a huge range of international authors and illustrators' books to the UK market, gorgeously presented and featuring stories that feel so different, fresh and original to the usual boring samey old books we're all getting a bit tired of.

4) As with the ratings site, consider ways to increase your book's profile amongst teachers and librarians. Again I had a crazy idea that if we didn't continue with ReadItDaddy, I would dearly LOVE to do a blog that could help teachers and librarians pick out books for schoolkids to suit the various stages of a child's literary education. The only problem is I really don't have a clue how to objectively classify books as suitable for specific stages (EYFS, KS1, KS2 etc). Part of the problem there is that to me, I can only base a recommendation on what my own child is or was reading at a particular age but obviously there's a lot of wiggle room in ability for each child as a reader. I would love to see this happen and I know a lot of teacher-run / school librarian run book blogs are an excellent source for this stuff. You can't rely on the government or official educational bodies to get this right but it feels like it would be such a huge win both for publishing and for teaching.

5) Relax the rules for new authors. I'm not saying that publishers should just let any old unedited tat fly, but I think that there are so many obstacles in the way for new authors, and part of the problem stems from the harsh set of rules that need to be adhered to. The industry may well have economic reasons for insisting that new authors fit their books to those rules, but it does stifle creativity, and means that most dedicated unpublished authors spend so much time paring down texts or trashing ideas that would probably work quite well if they were given a little more slack.

These are just a few of my naive ideas. On the positive flip side to last week's post, most of the #Booky100Keepers we listed recently came from small run or indie publishers, though these days it's so difficult to keep track of who has been soaked up by a bigger publisher, which imprints belong where etc. There are publishers out there who are dedicated to stamping out a unique brand for their books, and often that brand is changed frequently to genuinely reflect the constantly shifting trends and changing tastes of book consumers. Sadly though, as we said last week, some just don't get it, and usually they're the ones making the most noise and garnering the most press.

Twitter has been aflame again, all because of this bloke. Fresh from being torn a new one for Little Britain (alongside Matt Lucas), David Walliams has once again been in the firing line this week as it seems someone actually took a few moments to actually read the contents of one of his books, taking offence at the way characters are depicted.

Describing Walliams' character assassinations as cruel, borderline racist, wholly politically incorrect and unsuitable for kids, it's weird that it's actually taken this long for someone to notice that Walliams' trademark comedic writing style is hugely based around this type of stuff.

We waded into the Twitter-scrap with a couple of points made about the reasons that Walliams' depictions of working-class 'heroes' are so skewed, and there's no other place to lay the blame than at the children's publishing industry - that would happily trade a few rather unsavoury views from a million-selling author for the inevitable colossal revenues that author makes. Children's publishing isn't here to steer your kids through the moral maze of early life, it's here to make a shitload of cash - often off a few authors whose books are guaranteed to sell.

One or two authors waded into the fray bravely (as they always do whenever Mr Walliams work crops up on Twitter, though obviously not through any professional envy of his sales, or jealousy of the amount of promotion his books get - whether they need it or not - oh no!). I was quite intrigued by one person's theory that the rise and rise of just a few select authors is entirely down to the (quite frankly) pathetic amount of coverage children's books get in the mainstream media. "No one's reviewing books!" was the claim. Bit of a slap in the face when you've been reviewing them for ten years, have garnered a metric ton of regular readers and followers, but obviously don't work for a major trash rag (or newspaper as some people call them), or aren't 'celebrity' enough to talk about books to your zillion and one Instagram followers.

Publishing is so achingly middle class that it's actually almost turning into a parody. We wrote about this two years ago in another ReadItTorial - Are children's books becoming more 'elitist / classist' as publishing becomes increasingly dominated by the "Middle Class"? - A ReadItTorial - and re-reading this the points still stand. I think back then I rather over-optimistically thought that things might change for the better, and soon - but it definitely has not been the case.

Once the focus on Walliams had died down a bit, authors and book folk began to bare their teeth at others. Enid Blyton is currently being held up as 'the person who kicked off the whole problem' of market saturation by a single author. Her bigoted and quite often openly racist texts have already been subject to some rather creative editing for newer published versions of her stories, but the class thing has wholly been ignored. Blyton's working class folk are depicted as thick, lazy, often criminal in intent, and quite often the villains of her stories - so yeah, that whole class bias thing isn't exactly new in children's publishing.

Then Roald Dahl came under fire. He's already been given a thorough verbal kicking on Twitter for his anti-semitic views, but others picked out parts of his stories where racist stereotypes crept into otherwise excellent stories.

As I tweeted, I still think that a huge lack of representation for working class authors in the industry is not helping things at all. There are a few authors who've somehow managed to infiltrate middle-class-dominated kidlit, but they often struggle to stay put, often find that their core subject matter isn't what agents or publishers or commissioning editors are looking for. I remember the market being quite different when I was a kid growing up in the 70s, and it felt like there were so many more books around that featured kids like me who had a fairly poor upbringing, but could wholly identify with a central character in a book who wore torn hand me down clothes, a bit of a latchkey kid whose parents were absent not because they were gadding off on a round-the-world cruise or were wrapped up in their jobs as highly successful fashion designers / international spies / TV personalities, but because they were working every frigging hour just to put food on the table.

The entire children's publishing industry is due a reboot. Not just because children's books are suffering from the hard applied rules that new authors face, like an insurmountable brick wall, but because there really is no way for a normal everyday person to eke a living out of writing (certainly not for many, many years) - so retention of talent other than those best-selling authors just doesn't happen. The whole model is either fragile or irreparably broken from one end to the other, and I sincerely doubt that, despite the clamouring on Twitter and the insistence that the publishing industry just got a rocket up its arse, things really won't ever change and let's face it, we live in a country where the creative arts are treated like mere folly anyway, so there's that mountain to climb too.

Though we've probably mentioned it or alluded to it a couple of times in recent #ReadItTorials, the question of 'what comes next' for the blog has been an intense topic of discussion between C and Me over the course of this year. She knows the blog is coming to a close and knows why, and we've often talked about what comes next.

Would she want to carry on, do her own thing maybe, follow other tween and teen book bloggers into the fray?

Would she want me to carry on?

What about all those 'free' books (that last one sounds a bit 'mercenary' but let's face it, no book blogger out there who receives advanced 'free' copies of books would comfortably claim they wouldn't miss being on those PR lists and databases).

I'm proud of my kiddo, she's way wiser than her years and last week while we were out taking our 'government approved' walk / exercise for the day (just the two of us as her mum was busily waiting in for a non-book related parcel) the topic came up again.

"I don't want to do my own book blog" she said. "I don't want to carry on with ReadItDaddy." She looked at me with a worried expression on her face, almost like she was wincing expecting some massive explosion from me or an accusatory "BUT WHY, WHY WOULDN'T YOU?!? WHYYYYYY!"

She then carried on. "I love books, I love reading books, but I can't WRITE about books and I don't want to. I just want to read for the love of reading."

That more than anything struck me as the reason we are really calling it a day this year and again this is something I truly believe a lot of book bloggers struggle with many times over the course of writing their blogs. That thing where you feel the intense pressure of covering books you have little or no interest in, doing so around their release dates, being on blog tours purely because not being on them will count you out of something that may (but probably won't) increase the hits to your blog or at least the exposure of your blog to others.

I also fully respect the bloggers who don't want to leave the cosy family circle of the children's publishing industry. Those who have done such a brilliant job of becoming blogging celebrities, often as well known and well respected as the creatives who feed their blogs with awesome reading material.

Hearing that C didn't want to carry on was a tiny blow at first but hearing WHY she didn't want to carry on was interesting, because I can fully understand what it's like to be a tween and have the world at your feet, and so many ways to spend your spare time (and as any parent of tweens knows, their spare time is as minimal as ours is).

The "free books" question never really has been a question worth giving any time to. Books will always be in our lives, we buy an awful lot, we read an awful lot, we are immensely thankful for our local library having a brilliant selection - and of course it'll be quite nice to go into bookstores again and buy loads of books. Books we choose, books we genuinely want to read.

Once I could help C understand that I wasn't mad, I wasn't even a tiny bit miffed really, her face lit up and we carried on with our walk, talking about all the daft stuff a dad and daughter do when they get time together.

So that was that.

Reading for the love of books, and blogging about them because you truly love it, should really be the only reason you begin a book blog. If you feel that it's becoming a chore or you feel that you're being drawn into 'competing' in a crowded blogspace, or even if you're only doing it because you truly believe it'll net you a dream job then maybe take a long hard look at why you're doing what you do.

Saaaaaam! Don't Go....! Stay!

We're officially on the slowly meandering path to eventual wind down here at ReadItDaddy Towers, but weird things keep happening to draw us back into the idea of "staying on" in some form or other after August 12th. I can almost hear the collective groans from our readers "Look, stay, or go, DO SOMETHING BUT DO IT BECAUSE YOU WANT TO!" but this week in particular, we've...

1) Been listed in a well respected journal amongst other awesome book-blogging royalty:


2) Seen a massive upsurge in hits on the blog - weirdly not from the UK, but we're suddenly 'big' in Alaska and North America. (Canada still hates us though, eh?)

3) Had several PR contacts from awesome publishers we admire with new review opportunities.

4) Had a stack of new books arrive after a relative drought as the lockdown kicked in.

The thing is, it's actually very difficult to just quit something that you've invested such a huge amount of time and effort in, but it's also equally difficult to carry on with something under the same conditions that made you want to quit in the first place.

It reminded me of that scene in the fantastic Terry Gilliam movie "Brazil" - the moment where Sam Lowry, the "hero" of the piece, is about to make the leap up the career ladder away from the cruddy information department he's been slaving away in. Only in his dream his boss appears as a hideous monster made of bricks, pulling him back down to earth as he tries to break away.

The Little Miss and Me have discussed what's going to happen after August and it's clear that we just can't carry on trying to cover stuff we've only got a fleeting interest in. PR folk are lovely, and it's extremely difficult to say no to folk who contact us with review opportunities of perfectly wonderful and brilliant books that we just KNOW are going to become someone's favourite. Often over the last few weeks I've elected not to reply to emails asking us to join blog tours, or to look at books we just can't find the time - nor the heart - to write about.

So what to do, what to do...

I really admire the approach a few other book bloggers (whose kids have also 'aged out') have taken, to deal with the transition. Some just carry on without their kids' input and their blogs are still as awesome as ever they were.

Some alter their blogs beyond all recognition but you can still hear their core 'voice' in there, even after substantial reinvention.

Some just quit, but still keep a beady eye on the whole business, and maybe contribute the odd think-piece here and there (and that's likely to be the 'slot' we fall into).

There's another option of course, to drop our output down to a minimum, only writing about the stuff that really catches our eye, that we genuinely love, or perhaps even carrying on with the retrospective (after all, we're only covering 100 picture books in the run up to the 12th, we could just as easily carry on writing about scintillating non-fiction, amazing comics, fantastic chapter books and everthing in between).

Little Miss is still talking about covering books herself and I can't wait to see how that goes and what she comes up with (tweenagers know their stuff, know how to make the best of social media, and also know how to convey their thoughts about the stuff they love with the language and clarity that their peers can relate to and understand).

So we're at a fork in the road. Not so much a fork as a spaghetti junction of options but still with the 12th of August looming on the horizon, and the decision not becoming any easier.

Ah reading, there's nothing quite like becoming entirely immersed in a book to take you away from the stresses and strains of the real world.

Though a lot of the news articles at the moment seem to be from folk who've discovered reading anew, we're book worms and haven't really noticed a massive upsurge in the amount of books we're reading compared to normal.

If anything, sadly, the Coronavirus has taken its toll on the number of books we're getting to review (but we have plans to deal with this, as you'll see in a few days' time - starting on the 4th May in fact).

So we are reading fewer "different / new" books but it's given us time to work our way through our back catalogue to some extent.

For C, this has meant working her way through her beloved "Dork Diaries" books, simply because she wants to indulge in a bit of 'comfort' reading, blasting through a series that she's familiar with is like bubblegum for the eyes, though by now she must know those books from cover to cover.

I've been working through a lot of comic series I've meant to catch up on for ages but am also pulling out books I've previously read (most of which are 'end of the world' novels, I guess I just have some morbid obsession with dystopian fiction at the moment).

I wonder if other folk who are working from home are scoffing at some of the suggestions that a lot of us suddenly have more time on our hands. Other than the time I've clawed back from not having to take part in the rat race / morning and evening commutes, I've got no more time than I had before - and often the pressure of working from home (currently as part of a team administering and supporting our place's major strategic lynch pin for other home workers) means I'm even more burned out in the evenings than I was before (I can only guess that without a boss looking over their shoulders, some work from home folk are slacking off!)

Books are magic, we all know this, so when I do finally settle down in the evening to read, I'm instantly taken out of the world and into the book world I'm immersing myself in.

The one thing about my current chosen taste in books is that I am finding a lot of dystopian fiction somewhat twee in comparison to the real-world experiences of the last few weeks.

I like the fact that each piece of fiction is rooted absolutely in the era that it was written in, where the imagined horrors of the end of the world are actually about the imagined horrors of that author's particular direct view of the world, its experiences and its benefitst, ending abruptly or changing to reflect 'the new norm' (I still hate that phrase).

I was discussing with my brother whether there would ever be a need for dystopian fiction ever again after this current crisis becomes a memory (a time some distance in the future, I really do believe that even when the lockdown is lifted, we won't ever quite return to what we once perceived as 'normal') -

Human nature dictates that for years to come, there'll be a lot of weirdness around simple acts we previously took for granted, like shopping in supermarkets, passing strangers in the street or even the simple act of someone sticking out their hand for a handshake upon meeting, or the way people react when someone coughs in a queue at the post office. One thing missing from a lot of dystopian fiction is the way that the 'social' aspect of social media is conveniently disposed of. Even in books that are set well within the timelines of the rise and rise of Facebook and Twitter, even MySpace for that matter, social media scarce gets a mention yet in the current lockdown and pandemic conditions, social media is the glue that is keeping many people sane and on an even keel, and of course is also keeping them in touch with friends, family and loved ones.

My brother, the wise well-read weirdo that he is, seemed to think that we really are on the brink of the death of dystopia - and that despite the many cash-in novels you can probably imagine that will emerge initially from this crisis, there will be a huge demand for bright, breezy, happy and positive stuff as that's the 'norm' that people will want to return to.

Dystopia well and truly fell out of favour a few years back, only to begin a slow and steady rise back into the spotlight before the current pandemic. I still believe that there may be a place for it, even despite all this.

It's been tough to devote time to #ReadItTorials recently, mostly because I've been working from home and sitting in front of a computer screen to type stuff in my spare time feels like an extension of the working day even more than it did before.

So this week my mind has been occupied with the 'happy ever after' - to quote a  book cliche - the world returning to normal.

Only I don't think I know what 'normal' is any more.

I won't pretend every aspect of the lockdown has been fun. Missing friends and family is the obvious toughest part of all this, and it's been particularly tough on C's grandparents who now don't get to see her because of the risks (and the sensible measures to ensure folk stay at home).

But we're weirdly adaptive, we humans. It's amazing how it's taken a few weeks to get used to working from home (something I had done before a fair bit but on odd days here and there, not for weeks at a time) and it's also amazing how adaptive kids are to their new way of life and their new way of schooling. I've watched C doing what millions of other kids around the globe are probably doing too - engaging with virtual learning, making use of the internet for the purpose it was originally intended for - to help us learn, to be more productive, and to do this wherever we might find ourselves.

I've been around way too long in IT - so I remember the first time I saw Mosaic (the ancient original browser that most of us old goats first encountered the Internet on) and I remember back then falling hopelessly in love with the idea of creating web pages (ugh, some of them probably still exist out there too from that era via the WayBack machine - embarrassing soul-bearing that's worse than finding one of your old teenage diaries).

Of course now the Internet has massively changed and I doubt anyone back in the early 90s would have imagined the things we'd do with it now. I mean CATS sure, but the things that have made the lockdown bearable, the many ways it's become something that constantly shifts the balance of our love / hate relationship with the world online.

But this week I can't stop thinking about what I'm going to feel like when my employer calls us all to return to work. It'll be weird and there will be good and bad things about it. Seeing colleagues again, seeing who got older, fatter, balder (that's just me) but also hearing people's stories first hand rather than via a Teams or Zoom meeting, or a couple of lines in an email.

But for me I'll be returning with a heavy heart. The current situation has made me realise just how much of our lives we devote to the worst parts of being humans in someone else's employ. The commute, the sheer stress of it (for us it begins with the school run, then a car or bus journey to work in shitty traffic). Then there's the business of sitting in an office (with an increasingly shorter break for lunch each year) for 7 and a half hours each working weekday, staring at a screen and (for me at least) doing a job I am actually more productive, more inspired and motivated to do while sitting in the comfort of my own home connected to all the systems I would at work.

I've spoken to colleagues who agree and disagree with me, and it's funny that most of the ones who agree are folk with kids - who have become closer to their kids, and heck, their spouses / partners too (though I'm sure there are an equal number who are at the point where their other halves are secretly plotting their demise, or at least daydreaming about it!)

What the heck has this got to do with books? Nothing really, suffice to say that the stories - and god help us - the kids books that are going to come out of this are going to flood the market, I bet. Suddenly a million dystopian novels or dark kids books are going to feel slightly whimsical in the face of 2020 - the year we were served a lesson in who the top dog on the planet is, and sadly it ain't us humans any more. It's a fellow virus, and I sincerely hope that we walking talking two-legged viruses learn something from that weird little purple spiky git.

I don't wanna go back to normal. There are things I do want to go back to but damn, I really hope the way we work changes for the better. Surely it has to.

"Robot Dad" - Ever feel like you're faking it?

Maybe I think too much. As George Ezra is currently singing "What a terrible time to be an over-thinker".

I'm pretty sure I always have been one, but sometimes when my inner monologue gets shouty and loud, it takes a touch of wisdom from my wife to put things into perspective.

There are so many moments when, as a parent, particularly as a dad in fact, that you'll feel like you're stuffing up. Sometimes you do things that are meant to be funny but fall horribly flat. Sometimes you say things that you instantly regret, chastising your kids for doing things that you know full well you did yourself when you were of a similar age.

Sometimes you worry that whatever you do to instil in your kids a strong moral compass, a decent grip on what's right and what's wrong,  they will still do things that make you wonder whether they take in your advice to steer them away from danger or threat, and ignore it just to tick you off.

I'd been having a lot of this sort of thing going on in my head for a long time, and it came to a head a couple of weekends ago when I made a decision for a day out that rapidly went south, and ended up with everyone having a massive grump at each other.

It took a couple of days for things to calm down but there were a lot of shouty exchanges, and I just felt like I did the very thing I always hated in my parents and grandparents - I didn't listen.

Listening to your kids is one of the most important skills any parent can learn, and it pays off in many different ways. If your kids tell you that they'd rather talk to a teacher than you, something's going horribly wrong.

Thankfully in this instance we all managed to talk out the annoyances and frustrations of the 'gone wrong' weekend. It was a massive relief to feel like the house was getting back to normal, and then there was an added bonus. I'd assumed that as C progressed further into tweendom that the bedtime book had finally died. Most of the time in the evening we're all wrapped up in our own winding down, I'm usually scribbling away or writing the blog, and the girls are usually on their phones. Tonight though, C came in and asked (in a very sweet way) for a bedtime book.

I was slightly taken aback, but we still have a lot of picture books around the house (though middle grade stuff is slowly taking over) - and so I let her choose. She chose Jonny Duddle's "The Pirates of Scurvy Sands" - a truly brilliant picture book that is filled with the sort of illustrations that both C and I can't get enough of. So many details to share a moment over, so many nods to other books by Jonny that we've enjoyed again and again, and some truly brilliant / awful rhymes that make us giggle and groan equally.

I've often written about what it feels like when your kids get older. There are kidlit bloggers out there with much younger kids than C who are still coasting on those golden times when they bond over books, and sometimes I find myself feeling envious. No wait, correct that, I'm insanely jealous, but with the best of well-meaning intentions.

Yet you get to trade those lost times with new experiences and at the moment the 'gain' is talking to a brainbox of a girl who is rapidly finding her own direction in the world and has her own strong views, her own amazing personality, and of course her own tastes and preferences when it comes to books which sometimes align with mine, and sometimes run off at a complete tangent.

I find myself listening to her talking about books she's enjoying and reading that really aren't my cup of tea, and likewise we trade thoughts on the (dwindling number of) picture books we still cover.

Quite often with chapter books I'll pick up ones she's finished that I've previously ignored, and can understand what she sees in them and why it's rocky ground sometimes as an adult when you're reviewing children's books and assuming that you can assess them with as much insight and expertise as the audience they're really written for (see the #ReadItTorial on 'ugly modern children's books' from a few weeks ago for more on that particular quirk of adult behaviour).

One final thing is that as time passes, C starts to dig into books I'd previously kept well away from her. Still screening out the unsavoury stuff of course, but letting her loose on chapter books, comics and graphic novels that she can now decode and understand, and develop an appreciation for. I recently let her read through "The Guardians" by John Christopher - one of my favourite books of all time - and was secretly thrilled to see her really taking to it (even though she was extremely grumpy about the fairly flat ending).

I'm under no illusion that this blog is living on borrowed time. As I mentioned last week it's becoming really hard to concentrate on it, to give children's books the love and attention and the fanfare they so richly deserve when all you can think about is how crazy the world is now.

But we're not done just yet. As far as being an 'impostor' dad goes though, I'm lifted up by a couple of things my wife said to bring me back to my senses. C has bits of both of us, the good and the bad, and (as far as I know) we're not evil despots or nasty pieces of work so we shouldn't assume she will turn out to be one.

The other thing she said is that even when it feels like we're stuffing up sometimes, no parent (particularly parents of only children) can ever dismiss their own ability to be a GOOD parent based on the observations of how amazing / terrible other parents are doing.

"Ugly?" - What planet are you on?

Ugh, snobs. I hate snobs and always have. I hate elitism but from time to time it creeps into things I like - and this week it crept into kidlit like an unwelcome fart in a broken-down elevator packed with people.

As ironic as it probably sounds from someone who has a mere peripheral involvement in children's literature through blogging about kids books with my daughter, I cannot stand articles from sites that profess to cover kidlit 'professionally', but serve no purpose other than to get everyone's backs up.

With sweepingly inaccurate statements from the outset, designed to serve as nothing more than anger-inducing clickbait (I don't know what makes me more angry, the fact I clicked on the damned site, or the fact I read through the whole article, right through to its contradictory non-event of a conclusion), there's really no place for stuff like that in kidlit - but it seems even our hallowed favourite place to hang out is not without its trolls.

Like many others who were equally outraged and took to Twitter to vent about the particular article in question, I won't bother linking to the site or the article (and in fact I'm never going to make the mistake of going there again for children's book news or opinions, pretty sure they won't miss me) but if you missed it and want to read some drivel (delivered by someone whose mouth was probably in this shape while typing it up), go google for "modern children's books are ugly".



Here's the thing though. Kidlit folk are, in general, absolutely lovely so when you find a jarringly critical article that tries to pass itself off as a deep thinkpiece on children's abilities to decode illustrations, it throws you a curveball, and you're left wondering what the original intention of the piece really was other than the aforementioned trolling / clicks for kicks aim.

Initially, two things rolled through my mind once I got to the bitter end...

1) Of course modern children's books aren't ugly. That's probably one of the most inaccurate statements about kidlit I've ever heard, and what the hell does 'ugly' mean anyway?

2) Making a huge sweeping judgement of particular art styles based on your own (seemingly extremely limited and narrow) taste, then assuming that your views should be shoved up everyone's nose is, quite frankly, breathtakingly conceited. Apparently the article took two years to see the light of day. What a shame it ever did.

One of the artists in the firing line was Ella Okstad whose work we've always enjoyed (particularly in the fantastic "Squishy McFluff" books - which are just huge amounts of fun). Hailing from Norway, Ella's work is full of energy, often full of colour, and really is quite beautiful (the header pic above is from Morag Hood's excellent "Sophie Johnson: Unicorn Expert" - a book the article piled into like an angry rhinoceros).

Others were mentioned, before the article started to contradict itself by describing several examples of what the author considered 'beautiful modern classics' - works by some of the industry's most celebrated authors who do indeed turn out beautiful books - but are probably horribly embarrassed to be name-checked in a piece of tosh like this (in fact one of them very quickly took to Twitter to make a solid point about the richness and diversity of art styles present in modern children's books - Well done Benji, you're the man, and you phrased a response with a far more level head than I can manage!)

The more I thought about it (read: ranted about it to anyone who would listen), the more problems I found with the article.

In fact in 10 years of writing this blog, seeing many, many amazing children's books and a huge diverse variety of different art styles, quite often I'm amazed at how children are not only one of the toughest audiences to write / illustrate for, they are quite capable of making up their own minds about particular art styles that some adults might turn their nose up (or make that stupid upturned trapezoid mouth shape about).

It's all about context. Sometimes a story works just as effectively with sparse, energetic, sometimes even monochrome or pure line art. Sometimes stories work beautifully with highly rendered art that has quite obviously been laboured over. The key message is that the many different styles (of illustration AND writing) that exist in kidlit are the very thing that have kept us writing about children's books in our spare time for ten years.

I remember this sort of knee-jerk stuff being commonplace when I was a lowly art student, on the sharp end of criticism during my two years of formal training. With every project came a critique session, and with every critique session, usually came a stream of very personal (and sometimes quite cruel) "reviews" of particular art styles or finished pieces that didn't fit with that critic's own preferred styles.

Such is the nature of any creative endeavour that you will encounter negative criticism as well as positive, but there's a huge difference between constructive criticism or outright nastiness, or a lazy-pass crit just trotted out to massage the person's own ego (and by gad, I bet the author of that article is enjoying all those angry clicks, grrrr!)

Children are very tough, truthful and yet also constructive critics - yet the "boss" of this blog (my daughter) has never once levelled the insult "ugly" at a children's book (in fact again, after ten years of this, I can't actually recall a single commercially published children's title that has passed through our hands that you'd class as ugly). Sometimes C objects to books and we don't review them because of this - but I can honestly state that it's very unusual for the issue she has with a book to have anything do to with the artwork or an illustrator's particular chosen style. Quite the opposite in fact, it's usually the author who gets both barrels - and even that is such a rare occurrence that I can count the number of books on the fingers of one hand (after ten years and many thousands of reviews).

The article's core insult isn't just levelled at the book illustrator, it's levelled at the designers, the layout artists and the hard working art teams who can sometimes take an illustrator's work and turn it into something magical, within the severe confines imposed by the current favoured picture book "standards". It's also levelled at those who work hard to ensure that their catalogue of books represents the rich diversity currently present in the industry. Where would we be if all books looked the same just to fit a narrow view of 'beauty'?

Probably in the same place the beauty industry is currently.

Commercial art is not a breeze to produce (as anyone with meagre art skills will tell you - turning out professional commercially viable art is ridiculously hard, ever wondered why you rarely see celebrity book ARTISTS rather than authors?) - so we have nothing but admiration for children's book illustrators who define their own style, and use it to lift a story from something mundane into something magical.

I could list many, many gorgeous books - even books published this year in just two short months - that are absolutely stunning works of art in their own right. Both Fiction and non-fiction, living testament to the talented folk who didn't listen to twerps like the article author, and continue to hone their craft with each and every piece of work they put out there.

One of those cases where my own curiosity at what several disgusted twitterites were talking about actually bit me on the bum. Really wish I'd never seen it, though a week on at least it seems to have disappeared into a black hole so, ahem, sorry to bring it all up again.

"If it's good enough for Walliams, it's good enough for me and my kid!"

I didn't really want to blog about this. We'd already blogged about it four years ago, and back then I made some predictions about Simon Cowell's ability to write a children's book.

Simon Cowell can write a better kids book than you (or so he thinks). Time for a wake-up call - A ReadItDaddy Editorial

But now I'm here, fetch yourself a nice cup or two of your favourite beverage and be prepared for a long rant. So news has broken that Hachette have signed the music supremo - and his son Eric - up for a multi-book deal.

Quoting from an article in the London Evening Standard discussing the books:

"Simon Cowell and his six-year-old son Eric have signed a publishing deal for seven children’s books celebrating “individuality and positivity”.

The father-son pair’s Wishfit series will follow a group of “magical and unusual” hybrid animals, such as a snail/dog creature called a Snog and a crocodile/cat blend called a Crocopuss.

The books, published by Hachette Children’s Group, will launch in spring 2021 with three separate tales set in the magical world.

A portion of the profits will go to the charities Shooting Star Children’s Hospice and Together For Short Lives."

Sorry about the long drawn-out title of this week's #ReadItTorial2020 but I wanted to try and capture the essence of a tweet by fantastic author Joanne Harris - the author of the divine "Chocolat", "The Gospel of Loki" and many other amazing books.

Joanne's Tweet was:

Uncomfortable truth of the day: Boys who don't read books about girls grow into men who don't see women's achievements, or perceive women's lives and experiences as relevant to their own.

— Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) February 6, 2020

At first I understood where she was coming from with this and it's something I've read other authors saying before. It is very true and very fair to say that boys in general do disregard books either about girls, or featuring girls in the main roles, or as the primary character, whereas girls are more magnanimous and don't mind books where lead characters are male, female or nonbinary.

But does that automatically lead to the sort of sexist behavour we would all like to see stamped out for good? Where women are treated as second class citizens, abused or attacked, shouted down and generally given short shrift in many aspects of their lives?

Given that in this day and age books are such a small influence on our youth (I would say that books are probably right down there in 5th or 6th place trailing far behind the internet, peers, family influences, visual media and ads) would it be easy to tackle this thorny issue at the root?

Kids are tricky little blighters when it comes to any form of pattern analysis and a broad brush tweet like Joanna's makes assumptions that books somehow insidiously cause sexist behaviour - when in fact it's far more likely to be as a result of the way children are brought up, and what they take away from their key influencers as they grow up and begin to take more than just a bit part in the world around them.

I grew up reading anything and everything I could get my hands on (quite literally - if stuck at a relative's house I'd just trawl through their bookcases until I found something to read, whether it was copies of Woman's World magazine, old Readers Digest mags, encyclopaedias, cowboy novels - you name it, I'd read it if I didn't have an armful of books of my own with me)

I also grew up in households that quite often lacked 'strong' male authority figures, and these were the key influences on my current belief that men and women are equal, and that strong female figures and characters in fiction and non fiction deserve as much respect as anyone else.

I'd also consume books by the bucketload thanks to a decent school and local library (things that in this day and age are underused, underfunded, or are becoming more and more rare sadly) always with a sort of blissful ignorance about what boys were actually supposed to read (remember this was the 1970s, where despite the rise of sexual equality, there were still very hard lines drawn in school, particularly in peer groups of boys - and any deviation from those lines was seen as some sort of weakness). As I grew older I realised that I much preferred the company of bookish girls than boys anyway (if you couldn't care less about sport or 'scoring' or other 'bants' then it naturally follows that you'd always want to get into a conversation with a girl than a boy - and from what my daughter reports of what things are like in her school, it doesn't sound like much has changed in the last 40 years).

I loved books back then as much as I love books now, and read Heidi cover to cover, devoured "The Giant Under the Snow" (where, despite a couple of male accomplices, the awesome Jonquil Winters and her witchy mentor Elizabeth were undoubtedly the lead - and strongest - characters in the book). Now I'm trying to pass this notion on to my daughter so that she'll have a fairly broad (some might say 'adventurous') approach to what she reads and consumes, hopefully so she'll be far more well read than I am.

In ten years of reviewing children's books, there have been so many books that I dearly wished boys would read - but could understand why those books switch even the most bookish boys off.

Conflict is often an underlying initial setup or continuing theme of any books where a female main character features, and is oppressed by, bullied by, or constantly rolls her eyes about any male characters that are woven into the story (though again in the majority of stories, this is unfortunately good observation on the part of the author - that those conflicts really do exist in the real world, and that they make an excellent plot foundation - personally I find that horribly sad).

The rot sets in right from picture books for younger readers. Male characters are often set up as the pratfalling idiot in a story where parents feature. We've seen gluttonous dads who quite often need a mum to come along and show them how to do even the simplest parenting tasks. We've seen absentee dads more than absentee mums - even in some of our very favourite picture books. We've blogged at length about the 'dumb dad / missing dad' tropes in picture books and it seems that this also quite often continues well into middle grade books, where dads are undoubtedly (and perhaps more accurately) the parental figure who displays clear signs of immaturity, boorish behaviour, or will just muck about or behave like an idiot either through an assumption that they're less intelligent than their female counterparts, or follow a well-worn character cliche.

This is beginning to sound like a horrible "not all men" type of argument and believe me that's really not my intention at all. My point is that I want boys to enjoy character driven fiction without having any need to even consider that the main charactrer is either male or female, and that what they're going to read will be some diatribe against either sex.

Instead it should be the story itself, the theme, the setting, the moral (if there is one) and the twisting plot intricacies, the delicious descriptions and the writing that cuts through any gender gap.

For example consider that the truly amazing "Lockwood and Co" series by Jonathan Stroud is beautifully balanced, and not only female-narrative-led, but contains male and female characters that appeal to both sexes, treat each other (mostly) as equals in the course of each tale, and are hugely appealing to girl and boy readers. I'd probably mention the Harry Potter books too, though I'm still not convinced that JK treats the female characters in her books very well (apart from Hermoine, who still somehow manages to be written as the class know-it-all, the swot, the annoying whiny one, or the sensible one in a semi-detrimental way for all the moments when it's clear her character is the brains of the outfit - and some might argue the 'main' character in the books (because lord knows, Harry is pretty fecking useless most of the time, let's face it, and Ron is a very short step away from being a complete a-hole most of the time - sorry, my opinion, feel free to shout me down about it!)

So do we want to carry on with conflict in stories if we are ever to cut through toxic male (and to a lesser extent female) behaviour out there in the real world, if the opening chapters of most books do their level best to underline that conflict and make it one of the foundations of the plot?

What message does that convey and leave a reader with other than it's the norm, and really is that the root cause of the way boys treat girls and vice versa?

It's been a hectic week as January seems to linger on like an eggy fart in a VW Beetle, but there have been some fab moments in kidlit, with several of our online pals finally getting their first publishing deals, mentorships and - in a couple of cases - seeing their books finally make it into print.

We've always been deliriously happy to see these folk achieve their dream of making it into print, or entering into the exciting process of getting professional help with their fledgeling works. It's hugely satisfying to see a name on a front of a book that you recognise - not because that person's a famous author, but because that person's been a long-standing and awesome pal online and (hopefully) someone who's dipped into our blog from time to time to read our opinions on books.

Yet there's a flip side to all this. I spotted a couple of articles this week about the other side of the coin - the thorny pain of rejection.

Creatives are normally sensitive types, hugely protective of their work and though most will accept criticism (grudgingly) it's also easy to understand why so many feel kicked in the teeth whenever they get a fairly soulless boilerplate rejection letter.

Through normal processes of submission to publishers or agents, there is an acceptance that if you don't get a frenetic level of interest in everything you do (almost unheard of, but not entirely unknown), you've somehow failed. If you hear the dreaded words "Thanks but it's not right for us" or "Needs a lot of work" or any other form of actual feedback, it can at least feed back into the creative process. If you get something fairly 'flat' back, you have very little to go on.

The weird thing for me is that sometimes I read blogs or think pieces where the sense of entitlement some writers / illustrators feel is clearly misplaced. They have such a strong level of belief in their work that they also strongly believe they deserve to be published, they belong in that hallowed cadre of published authors - and perhaps even if they do make it there, and get one book published, each and every piece of work they submit from that point onwards should be automatically greenlit.

We all know that it really doesn't happen that way. Children's publishing is an industry, a business, a divine entity that may have the very best of intentions but also the clear intention to make a shedload of money (not all of which finds its way into prospective author / illustrator pockets, but let's not go down that road, that's still a subject for another blog).

Commissioning editors are canny folk. They have a deep knowledge of the trends that affect the book-buying public's decisions to purchase or not to purchase. They go to the book fairs, and spot potentially awesome book opportunities - or see other publishers taking on certain projects and books and think "We could do one of those, email our pet writers to knock out a few like that as it's obviously gonna be a big thing!"

In the UK the industry feels like it's more reserved, less likely to take risky chances (hop across the English Channel to France or Belgium and you'll probably find the exact opposite - where kidlit is seen as another branch of art, not necessarily as a way to print money). That makes it tough as hell to get a book out there - and again that draws me neatly back to the top-end of this article and the sheer admiration I have for those folk I know that have made it.

If the sense of entitlement comes from creative self-belief, that's a boat that's inevitably going to run aground, hit the rocks and sink.

However, if someone's truly put in the maximum effort possible, joined every organisation out there, SCBWI'd and networked their butts off, submitted to countless agents and publishers, read a ton of children's literature across all possible genres and yet still gets those fairly flat letters of rejection back, perhaps the message is clear - it may never happen and for some that's just something they'll never willingly accept.

They called him "The Book Murderer" and this image - of a particularly weighty tome being rent in half across its spine by a canny chap who just wanted to make it more portable - had Twitter a-fire this week.

When I first saw the image, the first thing I thought of was the cries of "Heresy!" that would erupt across my timeline from folk we follow - and sure enough there were some pretty nasty roasts and pithy comebacks to the fellah who bravely (well, let's face it, for clicks and giggles) shared this horrible image.

We've always gone out of our way to encourage our daughter to look after her books. When we visit other people's houses and see their children's books, bend, dribbled on, mutilated, drawn on or even in one case (shudder) with pages and images cut or town out, we almost end up in a cold sweat.

But is it really that big a deal? My own Twitter response was that it hugely depends on the book itself. If you're going to do horrible things to - say - an E.L. James book (let's face it, she did something pretty horrible to those books in the first place, she created them) or even Dan Brown (I remember seeing 36 copies of "The Da Vinci Code" all lined up, in pristine condition, at a National Trust second-hand book nook once, completely unloved but obviously flavour-du-jour for someone who thought that his achingly slow prose was worth persevering with).

Then there are those folk who do this sort of thing...



Or this...



..sometimes hacking apart old books to make something beautiful could possibly be allowable / acceptable (but in the image above I suspect those lovely old things were butchered needlessly).

We humans are a funny bunch. On one level we revere inanimate objects that bring us joy, on another level we are all about the convenience of the moment. Personally I think the book murderer is after the fame of it all, and is just being bloody-minded about not buying a Kindle and storing his over-length books in a handy portable digital device (which I'm won over on - not as a replacement for all books but certainly as the only way I can now consume longer books without going completely nutso).

Would love to see someone break a Kindle in half to make it more portable though!

Oh Mrs Coulter... (sigh)

When the winter months arrive, the incumbents of ReadItDaddy Towers find themselves snuggling up on the sofa together to watch a bit of seasonal telly. There's usually something we agree we can watch together (though most of the time I find myself needing to disappear whenever stuff like "Strictly Come Dancing" comes on).

But before Christmas we were treated to the latest round of dramatisations from the BBC, adapting classic books for screen with varying degrees of success.

I've long loved "War of the Worlds" by H.G Wells - and still believe that the closest anyone's ever come to adapting it for the screen was a fantastic animated version that (unfortunately) arrived in the same year as Tom Cruise's truly awful blockbuster. Completely overshadowed, it's all but disappeared, but if you hunt around enough you'll find it on DVD.

The BBC had been trumpeting their new version for a long time, taking the story away from modern times, back to the Victorian era depicted in the original novel (hooray!) with a stellar cast (hooray!) and what looked to be a fairly decent effects budget (hooray!)

Then it arrived as a three parter. Straight away there was a problem. Initially it looked to be pretty faithful but then it started hopping around in the story's timeline, effectively jumping from the moments before the Martian invasion, to the aftermath of a world devastated by the war machines. As the episodes unfolded, this continued until the whole thing became an unwatchable mess, spending more time shoe-staring than actually dealing with the themes the book did so well to convey, that we may think we're top of the pecking order but when we're confronted by an apocalypse, we go to pieces when our technology (and capability for destroying things) fails us (kinda topical but...nah, just nah).

Hot on its coat-tails, into 2020 now and "Dracula" was also adapted by Messrs Moffat and Gatiss - upgrading the influential character, modernising him, camping him up (though - let's face it - Dracula has ALWAYS been pretty damned camp, even in the original novel) and producing another three episode drama that fired a scattergun at a beloved classic, annoying and delighting viewers in equal measure (I watched the first episode which was OK, dipped into the second which just completely slid over my eyeballs making no impact whatsoever - I bailed on the third).

YET for all these so-so adaptations, the BBC and HBO had us utterly gripped with "His Dark Materials" - Splicing together parts of Philip Pullman's first two novels in this series, playing between Lyra's escapades in Alt-Oxford and the frozen north, and a more modern-day setting for the second book.

Though there were scenes that we felt were badly handled and poorly realised (still cannot forgive 'em for essentially stuffing up one of the most important scenes in the first book, where a poor abducted urchin is separated from his Daemon and is found hugging a dead fish in a freezing hut), and a lot of criticism was levelled at the fact that the show obviously couldn't afford to budget for Daemons for every character. But the performances were stellar, with Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson and James McAvoy acting their socks off to good effect, leaving us dangling on a cliffhanger and wanting the next series to hurry up and get here.

Elsewhere with more grown-up fare, Netflix's adaptation of "The Witcher" also boasts super-high production quality, and somehow manages to take the fairly toothy and 'not for the faint hearted' books (and for that matter a good dose of what made the games pretty special) and turn them into an amazing series. You see, it can be done - even with material that you'd swear was completely unfilmable.

Picture book wise, there was also a truly wonderful adaptation of "The Tiger Who Came to Tea" on over Christmas, perfectly honouring the memory of Judith Kerr's most well-known and celebrated book, in fact I don't think this got nearly enough love and plaudits on my timeline on Twitter. It really was wonderfully done.

Which is more than can be said for the BBC's version of "The Snail and the Whale" - For goodness sake give Magic Light something more decent to work with than stale Julia Donaldson books, PLEASE!

Adapting books isn't always easy - but sometimes, with the sheer amount of truly amazing stuff out there in kidlit (particularly in picture books) I'm left wondering why it always seems to be the 'safe' choices that make the leap from page, to script, to screen. We've said it in previous ReadItTorials and we'll say it again - there are many, many more authors out there whose works would make the perfect Christmas (or ANY time of year) movie or series. Give these folk a shot - and more importantly INVOLVE them in the project. No one wants to watch some producer / director's 'unique vision' for a story that stands up very well without any additional creative muddling.