The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist's attempts to decode a range of secrets. Jamaica Kincaid's work of fiction, "Annie John" (1985), illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist's maturity…

Although scholars have explored the meaning-making affordances of peritextual features such as dust jackets, case covers, beginning and final endpapers, frontispieces, title pages and imprint pages in picturebooks, limited research has focused on the peritextual elements of graphic novels. Purposive sampling was used to select a data set of 30…

This article offers a reading of Kate Darbishire's novel Speechless Stickhouse Publishing, London, 2018), following Harriet, a girl with cerebral palsy. It examines her irritation, born of her resentful awareness of her disability, as well as how she grapples with her life as an ordinary schoolgirl. The novel presents Harriet as an everyday child,…

Theodore Taylor's "The Cay" received a great deal of criticism upon its publication in 1969 for its racism, yet it has remained in American public school curricula for over fifty years. Defenders of the novel have argued that it advocates for color-blindness, a position that has helped entrench it in schools. Meanwhile, few critics have…

Class and geography profoundly influence rural youth's opportunities and aspirations for social mobility (Carr & Kefalas, 2009). Neoliberalism insists this mobility is achievable individually through education, though education is also often antithetical to the rural lifeworlds and communities of youth pursuing it (Corbett, 2007). These…

The framework of visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006, via Serafini, 2014) is used to examine the artwork of Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll's "Speak: The Graphic Novel," which tells through words and pictures the story of Melinda Sordino, a girl who is raped just prior to beginning her freshman year in high school. Three…

The study focuses on the necessity of an anthropomorphic approach in deconstructing the symbolic understandings of animals in children's literature, and considers how such an approach can be used to draw ethical attention to the unnatural history of animals in the Anthropocene. The paper analyses three children's novels that depict animals without…

Students in the English Language Arts classroom have access to more author commentary than ever. While following authors on social media may deepen students' engagement with their assigned reading, it also threatens to subdue students' own interpretations of the authors' texts. This essay explains how educators can introduce basic aspects of…

Holistic ecology considers nature and society as a whole, viewing humans and the environment as interdependent and interconnected. This article takes the lens of holistic ecology to examine the representation of human--nature relationships in Patrick Ness's "A Monster Calls" (2011) and explores how the novel guides the child reader to an…

Drawing on cognitive criticism, and using Theory of Mind, transportation, and imaginative resistance as a framework, this essay analyzes the ways in which Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows Duology, can build understanding of and empathy for people with living with mental illnesses. Maria Nikolajeva's germinal work on cognitive approaches to literature…

This article reconsiders Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" 50 years after its initial UK publication, and over a hundred years since Dahl's birth. It suggests that the book has often been misinterpreted, in that the work is more critical of modern capitalism than is often recognised, capturing a post-World War II shift in…

The astronomical success of "Matilda the Musical" can be attributed to a variety of factors, including the popularity of Roald Dahl himself. Yet, anyone who knows the novel cannot help but notice that this award-winning musical has made significant changes to the original plot. While revisions are to be expected when novels are adapted…

This article reflects on insights gained from a larger study that explored how a class of ten- and eleven-year-olds read and responded to David Almond's hybrid novel, "My Name is Mina." Through focusing on the children's performances of the poems contained within the text, the discussion examines embodied aspects of the children's…

This essay argues that Maggie Thrash's "Honor Girl" navigates a multi-liminal space allowing it to participate in and expand upon traditions that already exist within children's literature, graphic memoirs, the comics medium, and the history of girl camps as homosocial spaces. By discussing graphic memoirists for adults (such as Alison…

The article discusses the image of the family and the family home in a series of novels for young people by the popular Polish writer Malgorzata Musierowicz in the context of literary conventions and stereotypes about the family in contemporary Polish society. The novels, which cover a period of over 40 years, generally fit contemporary Polish…