Hello and welcome to The Cubhouse, a blog about writing, reading, finding, researching and analysing children's and young adult books 📚
I'm Siobhán, a developmental editor working with authors of middle grade and YA fiction. I'm also a mum, a volunteer school librarian and a Children's Literature MA grad, so my interest in kidlit is personal and academic as well as professional!
I passionately believe that children and teenagers need and deserve access to great stories, not only because reading for pleasure develops empathy, boosts comprehension levels and contributes to overall happiness and success in life, but also because it's fun.
That's why I spend my days helping brilliant writers create wonderful books fo children and teenagers.
Joelle Wisler
Siobhán's advice shaped my manuscript and query into a project that got a full manuscript request from an agent in the first week of querying.
Jennifer Grolemund
I am completely BLOWN AWAY! Your feedback is SO helpful and SO thoughtful. You are a truly talented editor!
Hazel Compton
One of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing. I’ve been writing for years, but this manuscript critique has developed and delved into a much stronger, deeper and focused version of my novel.
Angela Kecojevic
You’ve nailed everything and picked up on the things only an editorial expert can spot! You really have been amazing. I couldn’t have asked for a better editor to help with this!
This is part two of my serialisation of my kidilt genre course Space opera, steampunk and slashers, oh my! I’ll be sharing the content here every week over the coming months but you can grab the full course now if you just can’t wait! Read on for two lessons with videos and transcripts.
No rules, just guidelines
Before I dive in, I want to say that you should always trust your gut and ask questions. Everything in these lessons is based on my experience, training, education and values and I guarantee there will be other publishing professionals out there who have different ideas and advice to mine so you don’t have to take everything I say as a rule set in stone that can’t be broken.
I don’t want you to walk away from this course thinking ‘Oh no, Siobhán said my manuscript is totally wrong, I need to scrap it and start again’ (I’d NEVER say that, by the way!) or ‘it says here that my book should be historical fiction when I thought it was a gothic romance – that really doesn’t sound right but I guess she knows best.’
If something I say here doesn’t ring true for your manuscript, you should absolutely question it and go looking for your own answers. As I always say to my editing clients, take the advice that feels helpful and valuable and leave the rest. This is your book, not mine. I’m on your team and I really want to help you achieve your publishing dreams, whatever they are, but it’s not my place to tell you you’re doing it all wrong or you need to follow my ‘rules’.
Write what you love, experiment, have fun and always keep those young readers front and centre because they deserve wonderful books that make them happy, reflect their experiences and anxieties, make them feel seen and help them understand the world in different ways, whatever the genre.
What is genre?
Here are some of the most popular genres (click them to see what’s selling in those genres in UK bookshops right now!):
You’ve heard of all those, right? So we know what genres are but how do we tell which stories fit into which genre? It’s not always obvious and people don’t always agree on the categories. If you look up any novel you’ll probably find it’s been given more than one genre label by various reviewers and bookshops. But generally speaking, the main elements that tip a book into a particular genre are:
plot (is it about an adventure? A ghost? A murder? A flying rabbit? A love story?)
mood (is it dark and eerie? Light and funny? Frightening? Magical? Bleak? Thrilling?)
Being clear about a novel’s genre helps readers find the right book for them because it gives them clues as to what they can expect from your novel. Genres and subgenres typically come with particular expectations, conventions and tropes and although it can be great to play with those expectations by mixing genres or putting a fresh twist on familiar tropes, there are often distinctive characteristics and devices that readers enjoy and actively look for in their favourite genres.
Continuing my ‘Book Business’ series that I’ve been posting weekly on The Wolf Pack Facebook page, this week I wanted to take a quick look at the thriving YA romantasy market. I’ve worked with lots of authors who write or want to write romantasy or something close to it, and they often ask whether it’s a category that’s here to stay or if they’ve missed the boat. So let’s do a quick dive into the current landscape!
First, what is romantasy?
As you probably guessed, the word is a portmanteau of romance and fantasy, but beyond that it can be hard to settle on a really clear definition. Generally speaking, it refers to the romantic fantasy subgenre – a category within fantasy that relies heavily on a love story. It’s very common for YA novels to feature romance somewhere, so in that sense it doesn’t sound like anything new, but most romantasy fiction weaves in the romance in a far more central, inescapable way: the main plot can’t function without the romance, rather than just adding an extra layer to the story.
Some people feel that romantasy is, first and foremost, a romance novel that follows the conventional romance ‘beats’ (meaning the genre is romance and subgenre is fantasy) while some think it’s the other way round, with the primary genre being fantasy and romantasy being a romantic subgenre within fantasy.
Others consider it a more ‘spicy’, grown-up version of fantasy, featuring steamy sex scenes that put it firmly in the adult camp, but this feels very much at odds with the booming YA romantasy industry.
And even more confusingly, the success of the subgenre has meant that publishers tend to throw the ‘romantasy’ label around a lot, often using it to refer to any fantasy with a love story. Who can blame them when it’s such a huge buzzword right now?
So, now we’ve got a rough idea of what romantasy means, let’s look at the current market.
The growing popularity
Romantasy is a booming subgenre, bringing in over $600 million in sales globally in 2024 – a rise of $150 million from the previous year, and sales continue to climb. The rise in popularity is largely down to TikTok where romantasy titles have gone viral. It’s currently the biggest genre in the US and the second biggest in the UK.
Aren’t readers burnt out yet? Surely the market’s saturated
According to Publishers Weekly, romantasy is here to stay, but it’s going to evolve and grow. Brian Geffin, editor, says:
“It’s just going to keep growing broader and more welcoming, with romantasy tropes branching out into more and more subgenres, and with more crossover appeal in all directions.”
Some of those directions include dark, edgy plots, but also “a lot of cute, cozy vibes, and even some dystopian and space opera–style sci-fi,” he adds. “I think it’s becoming more and more a space where you can choose your vibe depending on your mood.”
Publishers are even creating new imprints, like Entangled and Tor Bramble, dedicated solely to romantasy, so there is clearly a sense that romantasy isn’t just a fad.
Don’t rush out and write one just because it’s trendy, but if you’ve got a work in progress that fits the bill, this might be the time to query it! A quick google shows dozens if not hundreds of agents actively looking to pick up new romantasy manuscripts and a glance at MSWL brings up lots of requests – it’s even got its own category.
Over in The Wolf Pack Facebook group (join us!), I’ve been posting weekly about a different topic in publishing, to give hopeful authors some insight into the current landscape and what the children’s book market looks like today. I wanted to share those here, too, and expand on certain points a little more in a way I couldn’t do on Facebook for fear of breaking the post character limit (if there is one!).
I started off by talking a little bit about what’s going on with middle grade right now in the US. The below is based on lots of research as well as my own knowledge of and thoughts on the kidlit landscape. I’m based in the UK so usually tend to gravitate towards facts and figure about the UK publishing scene, but a lot of my clients are from the US and are understandably worried about the current climate, so I’m kicking off with a look at kidlit in America.
The MG market in the US has seen declining sales over the past year, which is obviously pretty scary for children’s authors. Sales of print books specifically (paperback and hardback) fell by 5% in the first 6 months of 2024 (and they’d already fallen by 10% the year before), which might not sound like much but translates to 1.8 million fewer books being bought. Although there was a drop across children’s books in general that year, the middle grade market took the biggest hit.
There is less access to public and school libraries, and an increase in book bans and censorship. As Trump fights to shut down the US government’s library agency, this is likely to continue being a challenge
Overall reading proficiency at the middle grade level in the US is declining, partly driven by school closures during the pandemic
An increase in screen time – although this isn’t something that’s unique to American readers (it rose by a massive 50% during Covid in the US)
Children often discover new middle grade books at school, either through peer-to-peer recommendations or from their teachers. The pandemic put this on hold, even though books were still being published, so that loss in discoverability really harmed those new titles
A couple of years ago, the US bookshop chain Barnes and Noble significantly changed their stocking strategy, choosing to only stock frontlist titles based on performance rather than automatically buying new releases as standard.They said they would prioritise books with a big online buzz – not great for middle grade as these books don’t tend to make a splash in the same way as YA and adult titles, partly because young readers aren’t on social media, and particularly bad for debut authors who have no track record. They also reduced the number of hardback middle grade books they sold, which had a big impact on publishing because most books are published in hardback initially, before coming out in paperback.B&N felt hardback books were too expensive for the middle grade audience so took them off the shelves, meaning readers weren’t getting access to those titles until they came out in paperback, sometimes a year after the initial launch buzz had worn off.
Final thoughts
I definitely don’t want this to put anybody off writing or querying middle grade in the US. It’s important to understand the challenges this category is facing, and the landscape is probably going to shift permanently in some ways, but that doesn’t mean middle grade is dead. Everything in publishing tends to be cyclical and it’s likely things will improve.
There’s been a huge boom in MG graphic novels in the past couple of years, and hopefully this will contribute to a rise in reading for pleasure in general, which will in turn lead to more sales in all formats and genres.
I don’t want to get too political here but for things to really change there needs to be a bigger focus from the US government on reading for pleasure, diversity and the importance of libraries, and a move away from book bans and censorship.
Publishers will need to respond to the rising appetite for graphic novels and take maximum advantage of its marketability: I mean, what’s easier to advertise on social media than a gorgeous comic book spread?
In-store promotions are also helping to boost sales for middle grade titles so this is something that needs to be factored into marketing budgets moving forward.
This week I set up a brand new WhatsApp group to chat about kidlit!
This is a group for anybody interested in writing children’s books 📚 Chat, share stories, find a critique partner, recommend books, anything goes as long as it’s kidlit related! You can also use this group to chat about the monthly book club selection (spoiler free!).
RULES:
– be nice
– treat everything in this group as confidential
The nice thing about WhatsApp is that it generally feels more intimate and immediate than social media so it can be easier to feel comfortable with each other sooner, which I’d love, because I know there are lots of people keen to make kidlit friends and form a community, since writing can be lonely!
Everyone’s welcome! If you’d like to join, you can fill in the form below, email me your phone number or pop a message in the live chat in the corner of the page and I’ll add you.
Last year, I created my biggest course yet: Space opera, steampunk and slashers, oh my! A deep dive into children’s book genres for authors. It’s aimed at anybody who has written or is thinking of writing a middle grade or young adult novel and wants a bit of extra support getting their head around the many genres and subgenres in kidlit.
It’s probably my favourite course I’ve made because it’s so full of content that I’ve never been able to find anywhere else when I’ve gone hunting.
There’s often so much focus online and in craft books about the categories of children’s books – middle grade, chapter books, early readers, young adult – that it’s easy to think those are the only categories and distinctions you need to worry about.
But genre is really important, too! And there’s not a whole lot of information out there about what genre looks like in children’s books and you how can make sure your book is really hitting the conventions and expectations for a certain genre.
I’ve had brilliant feedback on this course and it’s something I find myself turning to again and again when talking to authors about genre. I often copy and paste snippets from a lesson for them, or send them my ‘monster guide to genres’ booklet. In fact, it’s been so useful that I started including the course for free when anybody orders The Monster from me.
So I started thinking: how can I help more people get value out of this course without the price tag? Because I truly believe the stuff in Space Opera, steampunk and Slashers, oh my! is crucial for any kidlit author navigating a new genre or working out where their book fits in today’s publishing landscape.
And that’s why I’ve made a slightly radical move! I’m going to be publishing the lessons from the course here on the blog, for free, over the coming months.
Follow along here or get it all at once!
You can follow along here and read through all the course content. Or, if you’re impatient and need to know this stuff now, you can purchase the course and get everything immediately.
The course itself is £168 and comes with lots of added extras that you won’t get here on the blog:
An interactive workbook
Genre bingo cards
Pretty slides and videos (with subtitles) for every lesson
Recommended resources and extra links
A personalised book recommendation
A discount code for future courses and services
And the biggest (and brand new for 2025) extra of all…
A personalised video giving feedback on your assignments and helping you work out what genre your book is.
So if you’d like to grab all those goodies, sign up for the course today.
Otherwise, follow along here while I share all my kidlit genre secrets!
Definitions
For this first post, I’m going to look at some terminology that crops up a lot when talking about kidlit genres. There’s a lot of jargon in publishing (and in this course!) so here are a few terms that will crop up here and what I mean when I use them.
⭐️ Kidlit: children’s books. This can apply to everything from picture books up to young adult novels but I’ll be focusing on books for readers around 8-18 years old here
⭐️ Middle grade: fiction aimed at children aged approximately between 8 and 12
⭐️ YA/young adult: fiction aimed at teenagers aged approximately 13 to 18
⭐️ Traditional publishing: getting your book published through the ‘traditional’ route of submitting to agents and eventually getting a publishing deal
⭐️ Self-publishing: publishing your book yourself without using agents or publishers Trope: a recurring theme or device that often features in books of a specific genre. Not a bad thing!
⭐️ Comp title: short for comparison or comparative, this is a book that is similar to yours in some way and gives agents and publishers an idea of your market and who might read your book when it’s published
⭐️ Genre fiction: books that fit into specific, easily defined genres like horror, science fiction, romance or western
⭐️ Speculative: any books that speculate on what could be as opposed to how things really are, imagining an alternative reality by asking ‘what if?’. Science fiction, fantasy and supernatural horror and anything featuring magic, nonhuman characters or the future sit under this umbrella.
⭐️ Genre bending: books that defy genre conventions or blend multiple genres within one book
⭐️ Diversity/representation: these terms refer to the importance of ensuring authors and readers of all races, sexualities, genders, abilities, religions, backgrounds and experiences are represented in publishing. It’s vital that all young readers see themselves reflected in the books they read and that children are exposed to ideas and experiences that differ from their own in order to encourage empathy, kindness, understanding and curiosity.
I spotted Frights to Tell at Night: Ghostly, Ghastly Tales by Anastasia Garcia on Instagram last year right around Christmas. I loved the cover and thought the collection of spooky short stories sounded good, but then when the light turned off and I saw the book glows in the dark I naturally had to buy it.
I am SUCH a sucker for glow-in-the-dark anything.
I contemplated buying it for my son as a Christmas present but decided he wouldn’t appreciate it as much as I would, so I bought it as a present to myself. And it didn’t disappoint!
The embossed hardback cover and spine with neon pink grinning demon and glowing ghost, illustrated by Teo Skaffa, are gorgeous, and that’s before you even get inside. The bright pink endpapers with little skulls, the polaroids of a slenderman-esque figure on the inside front cover, and this lovely intro:
But don’t be too afraid – scary stories are not just here to make our knees tremble and our spine tingle. Scary stories make us strong. They allow our mind to conjure up the most terrifying things imaginable so we gather our strength and prepare to face them. Remember, if you ever get too scared while reading, you can just close the book.
I say it all the time but YES, scary stories make children stronger! I love the reminder that they can just shut the book – I know this is specifically referring to being frightened, but I think that’s something children need to be told regardless of the story’s genre. Not enjoying it? Close it! Move on to the next book. Life’s too short.
So, with all that front matter out of the way, let’s look at the first story in the collection: ‘The Last Note’ inspired by an 1860s Jewish folktalke originating in Germany about a haunted violin. Garcia’s interpretation is a spooky tale of a young boy who dreams of being a professional pianist. His mother brings home a piano and he’s super excited to play it, but soon his dreams are filled with images of severed hands playing the keys at night. Or are they dreams? I loved the ending – it’s left slightly ambiguous but the implication is pretty horrific!
Something else that’s brilliant about this collection is that each story comes with a ‘fright level’ indicator so readers can prepare themselves for the scare or skip over the stories that might be too intense for them. ‘The Last Note’ is just one out of three on the fear scale, and I’d call it creepy rather than full on scary so it’s unlikely to give children serious nightmares. There are a few grisly details, though, like the ‘jagged’ wrists, ‘bloody stumps like they were recently chopped off, the bone exposed and the hands afloat’. I love this, because authors always ask me if their manuscripts are too gruesome and here we have a fairly tame story aimed (I’d say) at a lower middle grade audience around 8 or 9 and there are bloody stumps and exposed bone all over the place! You can get away with a lot more than you think as long as it doesn’t feel deliberately over the top or gratuitous.
If you know me, or have ever read this blog before, you probably know I love The Wizard of Oz movie – like, a lot. To complete my Master’s in Children’s Literature a few years back, I wrote my dissertation on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and I had so much fun doing it (and I got a first, which was a bonus!). I thought about trying to get the dissertation published afterwards but the subject was so incredibly niche I didn’t think I stood much chance. So instead it sat on my computer, ignored and rusty like Tik-Tok in Return to Oz.
Well, wake up Tik-Tok! Dorothy’s here to wind you up. I’m going to share it, bit by bit, here on the blog in the hope that it will get a new lease of life. There was so much more I wanted to say in my dissertation but that blasted wordcount kept getting in the way. So, I’m going to add to it and annotate it as I go, and dive deeper into certain topics that interest me. I also plan to talk a bit more about the film, something I tried not to do too much in the dissertation as it wasn’t really the point of it but I was so desperate to do!
The original essay was about the use of colour in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how a deep analysis could uncover truths about a whole manner of ideologies and schools of thought, from feminism to Marxism. But perhaps what interested me the most was the intertextuality, the stories that inspired and were inspired by Oz and how just one colour – red or orange or blue – could magic up deep connections with age old fairytales, religious texts or modern day movies.
I hope you’ll find something interesting here and, if you’re a children’s book author yourself, I hope this series will help you see how powerful your words can be. And maybe more importantly, how much reading and analysing texts – both widely and within your specific genre and readership – can and will transform your own writing craft.
Please excuse the formal, fancy schmancy academic tone here!
Abstract
L. Frank Baum and W.W Denslow changed the face of children’s literature in 1900 when they published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an expensively produced, full-colour book incorporating intricate colour plates and an innovative colour scheme, far beyond the simple, polychromatic texts children were used to at the time. Through close reading and visual analysis, exploring how words and illustrations interact and impact on one another, this dissertation will argue that colour is absolutely central to both The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s success and to any significant reading of the text.
I will draw from several critical approaches, all underpinned by a structuralist methodology: In Chapter One I will explore semiotics and picturebook theory, arguing that meaning can be revealed in Denslow’s artwork through discovering links with picture books and their use of colour signs and connotations. Chapter Two focuses on Marxism and how structures in Oz – highlighted by colour – might uncover consumerist ideologies and economic allegories in the text. Chapter Three concentrates on the story’s fairytale elements, establishing how colour is used to emphasise key themes and create convincing associations with classic European folktales.
My conclusion finds that colour is particularly crucial in reflecting mood, revealing religious and political undertones and demonstrating Dorothy’s psychological development, and that the connotative function of colour is more important in creating meaning than its denotative function.
You Are Most Welcome, Noble Sorceress 1
When L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, its first run of 10,000 copies sold out within two weeks² and it went on to be named the most successful children’s book of the year. One month after publication, the following review appeared in The New York Times³:
The drawing as well as the introduced color work vies with the texts drawn, and the result has been a book that rises far above the average children’s book of today. [The characters] have experiences that seem in some respects like a leaf out of one of the old English fairy tales that Andrew Lang or Joseph Jacobs has rescued for us. (1900)
The above succinctly identifies the key selling points of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Wizard4). First and most crucially, never before had such a beautiful, lavish book been created for children! Baum and illustrator William Wallace Denslow produced a text to which colour was fundamental: the story follows an intricate scheme that sees Denslow’s artwork change hue as the characters travel through colour-coded countries across a magical land whose geography obeys the laws of colour theory.
Fig. 1 This map first appeared in the eighth book, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), but Wizard follows its geography and colour scheme (although Gillikin Country does not feature).
Just three of its page openings are image-free and black and white. The remaining 304 pages consist of polychromatic, illustrated double-spreads as well as 24 vibrant, tipped-in colour plates. In fact, Denslow’s artwork was so extravagant that publishers refused to pay for printing, so he and Baum agreed to cover the cost of the colour plates themselves when the George M. Hill Company took on the book. So stunning was the finished product that it “revolutionized the design of American children’s books”, according to Michael Hearn’s introduction to his The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973:xlvii)5:
“They would never be so wan and boring again. Baum and Denslow proved that novelty could sell”.
Thirty nine years later, the story would also influence the film industry. MGM’s phenomenally successful The Wizard of Oz (1939) directed by Victor Fleming was so drenched in colour and made such unique, renowned use of technicolour technology that it is often mistakenly thought of as the first ever colour film (Edit: the first colour movie to hit cinemas was actually British short film A Visit to the Seaside in 1908). Its striking transition between the sepia tones of Kansas and the glorious, highly-saturated hues of Oz astonished the film-going public, particularly as it was released during the Great Depression. Knowing how essential colour was to Baum’s story, the studio spared no expense and paid more than $250,000 for the bright lights required for the technicolour process (rumoured to have caused permanent vision damage in several cast members). Edit: Margaret Hamilton famously suffered third-degree burns on her face and body during an accident with a trapdoor when her green makeup caught fire – another example of the film’s dedication to colour posing health and safety risks.
They even turned Dorothy’s silver slippers ruby, because their vibrancy against the yellow brick looked more impressive. The adaptations did not stop there; Oz has been reimagined in countless celebrated books, films and stage shows, such as Lumet’s Oscar-nominated, Motown-inspired The Wiz (1978) and Maguire’s Wicked (1995), later adapted into an award-winning Broadway musical. Edit: Unlike the original book or MGM film, the Wicked franchise focuses heavily on the wicked witch’s green skin. At the time of writing my dissertation, I had seen the stage musical but the film starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba hadn’t yet come out so I wasn’t super familiar with the story and therefore didn’t explore it much.
In this essay, I will investigate why Baum and Denslow featured colour so prominently in Wizard and how that colour speaks to concealed connotations or ideologies. I will also explore several visual representations of Baum’s narrative in adaptations which approach the story creatively while remaining sympathetic to the original colour scheme, as I believe these interpretations will reveal new meaning and, in places, highlight the uniqueness of Denslow’s own choices. Baum wrote a further 13 Oz books after Wizard, thanks to letters from readers which convinced him it might make a successful series, but as there is not space to analyse all 14 books here, I will take Wizard as my only primary text. Baum had not planned to continue the story when he wrote Wizard, so it stands alone as a complete work, independent of later character and plot developments. Furthermore, Denslow was replaced by John R. Neill as illustrator after the first book, so this feels like a natural point of evolution.
Another attraction for children was Wizard’s straightforward narrative style and lack of didacticism, which Baum promised in his introduction:
“Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to pleasure children of today.” 6
Baum intended his book to be a more joyful, “modernized fairy tale” which omitted “horrible and blood-curdling incident”.
Edit: It’s funny to imagine what Baum might have thought of the Disney movie Return to Oz, which is anything by joyful (but still one of my favourite films of all time).
Whether he achieved that is debatable (Wizard contains several scenes which might be labelled blood-curdling) but the fairytale elements in the text are certainly successful, particularly its narrative style. Wizard offers less substantial characterisation than we might expect from a children’s story of this length;; though Dorothy’s actions show her to be brave and kind, she exhibits limited emotional depth (for instance, she does not much care what becomes of her new friends provided she returns home safely) due to Baum’s sometimes direct, unembellished language.
Her dialogue is less charged with irony, bewilderment and frustration than that of Lewis Carroll’s character Alice (1865), for example, though both girls find themselves in similarly perplexing situations. This minimalism is evocative of classic European fairytales, with which Baum actively engages throughout the text. In these early stories, characterisation was typically limited and female protagonists were often nameless. For example, the title character in the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” (1812)7 is introduced as “a dear little girl. If you set eye on her you could not but love her” (13), with no further description given. In their “The Frog King” (1812), the princess is simply described as
“so beautiful that even the sun, which had seen so much, was filled with wonder when it shone upon her face” (47).
In his book The European Folktale: Form and Nature (1982), fairytale scholar Max Lüthi describes this trend: “The folktale siphons off all three-dimensionality from objects and phenomena and shows them to us as flat figures” (23). This is why symbolism and imagery in fairytales are significant: Snow White’s pale skin, dark hair and red lips tell us she is innocent but womanly, in a way that the Grimms’ sparse text does not (1812). In Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697), red evokes danger, blood and, according to Jack Zipes (Why Fairy Tales Stick 2006), sexual promiscuity: “First, she is donned with a red hat… making her into a type of bourgeois girl tainted with sin, since red, like the scarlet letter A, recalls the devil and heresy” (35).
Edit: I’m a huge fan of Little Red Riding Hood – it’s my favourite fairytale – and I talk about it a lot in this dissertation. I think this point about the original folktales being so sparse and open to interpretation is a crucial one because it leaves so much room for illustration and colour to completely transform or even create meaning in a story. Think of your favourite picture books: would you or the child reader take so much away from them without the artwork doing so much heavy lifting?
In literary analysis, colour is often treated as a background feature of a text, its value overlooked in favour of plot and character. As children, we are taught to understand books in concrete terms rather than through symbols, but in fairytales, symbols are crucial to interpretation: colour symbolism can contribute to theme, mood and characterisation, and can signpost a tales’ moral overtones and ideologies. I will demonstrate that colour carries out this same important function in Wizard.
I will ultimately aim to prove that colour symbolism is used in a very deliberate, central way by Baum and Denslow, establishing links with a wide range of texts, from picturebooks to the Bible, and that colour is at the heart of many significant readings of this groundbreaking children’s book. Like observing Oz through the filter of the Wizard’s green spectacles, I ultimately hope that presenting the text through the theoretical lens of colour will uncover ideas and interpretations of Wizard that have not been presented before.
Notes
Baum, L Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago: George M. Hill Company, 1900. Page 21. All page numbers in future citations of the text refer to the Library of Congress’ electronic copy of this George M. Hill 1900 edition.
From Michael Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz, xli
No page number available.
I will henceforth refer to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using its shortened title, Wizard. This is a common abbreviation amongst academics and often appears in The International Wizard of Oz Club’s journal, The Baum Bugle. Oz researcher Atticus Gannaway, former editor of the journal, confirmed via email (included in Works Cited) that this abbreviation is appropriate here.
Unless otherwise stated, all future Hearn quotes are taken from the 2000 edition of The Annotated Wizard of Oz.
I was reading Klassen and Barnett’s ‘Looking at Picture Books’ newsletter again and really loved their thoughts on why Klassen’s book, I Want My Hat Back, isn’t too dark for a young audience, despite publishers’ reactions when he was shopping it around.
In this book, a bear loses his red hat and asks several other characters if they’ve seen it. He’s really polite and thanks them all, even though they haven’t been remotely helpful, until eventually he finds the rabbit that stole it.
This time, rather than be polite, he eats the rabbit and takes back his hat.
Publishers thought this was too dark and recommended changing the ending so that the bear sits on the rabbit instead, or maybe beats him up.
But Klassen and Barnett agree that it’s perfect the way it is, and that those alternative endings would actually have been even darker – for two reasons.
One is that children have a certain familiarity with animals eating characters in books and are more likely to accept it as a mild punishment.
Often if you’re eaten in those, it’s more like being sent to your room or something. You’re just in there, and you don’t get to do anything for a while.
Barnett adds:
If the bear beat up the rabbit, we would be thinking about bruises and broken bones. But when I read I Want My Hat Back, I don’t think about the bear, like, chewing.
This is such an important distinction! In reality, of course, being eaten by a bear is horrific and violent, but within the logic of a children’s book it’s funny and not necessarily final. Babies and toddlers see their parents pretending to eat their nose or toes, or saying ‘you’re so cute I could eat you’ (see ‘We’ll eat you up we love you so’ from Where the Wild Things Are). It doesn’t sound violent when you put it like that! There’s a sense that you’ll be swallowed up in one quick, cartoonish gulp and just, you know, sit in their stomach for a bit. You’re not really thinking about bones crunching and blood dripping.
The other important factor is that we don’t see the bear eat the rabbit. The rabbit’s there one minute and then gone the next, with the actual act occurring off page and merely implied by the bear’s insistence that he’d never eat a rabbit when questioned later. Klassen says:
I think you get permission to go dark, at least partially, from the way you execute the thing. The bear has no visible mouth in the illustrations. No teeth. His eyes never frown. He is largely blank.
Klassen gives the young reader permission to not be freaked out by the rabbit being eaten by a bear by making sure the bear doesn’t feel too real or threatening. Sure he’s eaten the rabbit, but it’s just one of those cartoon eatings. He didn’t really get hurt. The same goes for Not Now, Bernard, where Bernard is there one minute and gone the next, although here the text does tell us explicitly that the monster ate him. We don’t see the bone crunching, though.
This reminded me of Good Little Wolf by Nadia Shireen, one of our favourite picture books at home. After the good little wolf saves his grandma from the clutches of the big bad wolf and convinces him to start a new life on the straight and narrow, the three sit down to tea and cake. On the penultimate double page spread the big bad wolf promises to stop eating people up… and in the last, we see him sitting alone with a full tummy. ‘I’ll stop first thing tomorrow’, he says.
He ate them! The cute little wolf and his grandma, after all that! But we don’t see him eat them, of course, and it’s not made explicit – Shireen doesn’t tell us ‘the wolf ate them’ so the child can interpret it however they prefer. My son did used to find this a little upsetting when he was younger, actually, but right at the end we’re reminded that this is a frame story: it’s all just a picture book the big bad wolf is reading to the good little wolf and his friends. All’s well that ends well!
This morning I was reading through the archives of Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett’s awesome Substack newsletter, Looking at Picture Books, and came across a really interesting question they were asked by a reader: why do parents police picture books so heavily and freak out if the story is too dark or scary, but they’ll happily let them play violent video games or watch frightening TV shows?
It’s an excellent point. Personally, I don’t police my son’s books. If we read something together that doesn’t gel with my own world view, I’ll discuss it with him and explain where I’m coming from, but I never stop him picking up whatever book he wants to read. (I do gently discourage David Walliams, of course, but that’s about it.)
But lots of adults do worry about books being too scary for children; I saw it for myself when I worked at my son’s school library and staff were gatekeeping what the kids could take home.
Klassen and Barnett reckon it’s partly a misplaced reverence some parents put on picture books. They’re supposed to be special, magical, innocent, and anything dark or unsettling warps that image. There’s also the fact that the parents have to actually read the picture books out loud to their children so they’re interacting with the words much more than if the child was just watching television or playing a video game.
Some parents, Klassen and Barnett think, worry that by reading a book aloud they’re somehow endorsing it, and so they’re much more invested in the content than if they just stuck a film on the TV and left the child to it.
Whatever the reason, Klassen and Barnett agree that it’s dangerous to censor the picture books we allow our children access to because they deserve to see the real world, warts and all, reflected in the pages they read.
It’s a lot easier to keep the hard stuff out of your kids’ books than it is to keep it out of their lives. But when you do that, you create a distorted literature — a world of books much sunnier than the lives of the kids who read them.
And that’s not just an artistic failure. It’s alienating for kids, who expect (and deserve) to see their whole emotional lives reflected in their picture books. And so those kids will seek out other artworks that better reflect their experiences and feelings.
For me, picture books are the best place for scary or dark stories and concepts because we’re right there reading with them. We can hold their hands, tell them everything’s going to be alright, and explore the ideas together. If they’re scared or have questions, we’re right next to them. That’s not (always) the same with video games and scary films.
Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Ambrosia at The Purple Booker. Here are the rules if you want to play along:
Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
I’m currently reading: You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (YA horror)
He taps the breast pocked of his dingy jumpsuit, and in the glow of the floodlight, I can see the outline of the heavy padlock we use to keep the front gate secure while the game is being played.
Hi there! I'm Siobhán, a children's book editor who is totally obsessed with horror. This blog is where I explore the spooky, the macabre, the gory and the strange in stories, TV shows, films and games just for kids and teenagers.
This is the sister blog to Writer and the Wolf, my editing website. If you’re writing your own children’s book, head over there for advice and support!
I am SUCH a sucker for glow-in-the-dark anything.
Something else that’s brilliant about this collection is that each story comes with a ‘fright level’ indicator so readers can prepare themselves for the scare or skip over the stories that might be too intense for them. ‘The Last Note’ is just one out of three on the fear scale, and I’d call it creepy rather than full on scary so it’s unlikely to give children serious nightmares. There are a few grisly details, though, like the ‘jagged’ wrists, ‘bloody stumps like they were recently chopped off, the bone exposed and the hands afloat’. I love this, because authors always ask me if their manuscripts are too gruesome and here we have a fairly tame story aimed (I’d say) at a lower 
Fig. 1 This map first appeared in the eighth book, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), but Wizard follows its geography and colour scheme (although Gillikin Country does not feature).
In this book, a bear loses his red hat and asks several other characters if they’ve seen it. He’s really polite and thanks them all, even though they haven’t been remotely helpful, until eventually he finds the rabbit that stole it.
This reminded me of Good Little Wolf by Nadia Shireen, one of our favourite picture books at home. After the good little wolf saves his grandma from the clutches of the big bad wolf and convinces him to start a new life on the straight and narrow, the three sit down to tea and cake. On the penultimate double page spread the big bad wolf promises to stop eating people up… and in the last, we see him sitting alone with a full tummy. ‘I’ll stop first thing tomorrow’, he says.
Some parents, Klassen and Barnett think, worry that by reading a book aloud they’re somehow endorsing it, and so they’re much more invested in the content than if they just stuck a film on the TV and left the child to it.
