In a long and riveting and highly recommended article in the New Yorker about the opposition to E. B. White's first children's book, Stuart Little, Katherine White (the aurthor's wife and a regular children's book reviewer) is quoted as follows:
It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely announcing their works as "suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen." Their implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows? Suitability isn't so simple...
No, suitability is not so simple. Tell it to the agebranders.
I'm very grateful to both grk-author Josh Lacey and Judy Zuckerman of the Brooklyn Public Library for pointing me to this excellent article.
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