Anna Staniszewski

The question of what boys want to be reading/should be reading has been around for a while, but recently I feel like I’ve been hearing even more about it than usual, like in this article by Martha Brockenbrough. It seems to me that what primarily defines a book as being “for boys” is the gender of its main character. Does that mean that my book, After the Failure, is a boy book because it has a boy protagonist? Or are there other factors that go into determining which books are given this label?

In thinking about the books we consider to be for boys, I kept coming up with various adventure and fantasy series such as Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. (This, of course, also says something about gender stereotypes and genre.) But not all of these series have boy protagonists. For example, the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld has only female main characters and yet it seems to have a pretty diverse readership. Is that because the books were written by a male writer? If these same books were written by a female, would we then label them as girl books? And what about books like The City of Ember and The Golden Compass? They both have a female and a male main character; is that the trick to making something gender neutral? And is being gender neutral the goal?

Ultimately I don’t think the books are the problem. It’s not as if children spring from the womb already knowing what boys and girls should and shouldn’t like. We teach them these things. And if boys are growing up being told that there just aren’t books out there that interest them, what are they supposed to do?

Instead of being encouraged to branch out and try different types of books, children (especially boys) are limited to the books that adults define as being for them. In dividing children in this way, we’re saying that all boys are alike and all girls are alike, which we know isn’t at all true. So instead of defining books by gender, we should define them by the quality of their writing, their stories, and their characters. I know this is easier said than done, but I think it still needs to be said.