[HPforGrownups] Dying and age-appropriate fiction

[psychic_serpent <psychic_serpent@yahoo.com>]

> Tyler wrote:
> be using. The ageing of charecters in 'real time'
> seems pretty unique to the HPbooks. I can't think of
> any other children's book series where the charecters
> age from story to story. Most stay the same age for as
> long as the author cares to write them. 
[snip]
--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Heidi Tandy" <heidit at n...> 
wrote:
> There is one similarly-maturing series I can think of, which we've 
discussed here from time to time. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little 
House series, which was semiautobiographical. 
> 
> Penny can speak more about the technical aspects of the books, but 
they definitely mature in terms of plot and style from the first to 
the last. I read them all when I was 9 or 10 but the romance 
attributes of the latter books were aspects I didn't get into until 
I reread them 2-3 years later. 
> 
> But Little House is more an American tradition for reading. The 
> Enid Blyton books, like Mallory Towers, have the characters age, 
> but the writing style never changes and it's not until the last of 
> the 7 books that there's a noticable change in the plot maturity. 


Actually, there are loads of books where the child protagonists 
age.  The characters in Madeleine L'Engle's time travel series 
(starting with "A Wrinkle in Time") age up considerably (Meg starts 
as 12 and in "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" she's a grown woman, married 
and expecting a baby).   The characters in Jane Langton's books 
about the Hall family (The Diamond in the Window, The Swing in the 
Summerhouse, etc.) age in every book; Eddy and Eleanor Hall start 
off at about 8 and 10 and are both in high school by the time of the 
fifth book ("The Time Bike").  I hope Langton writes more (although 
her chief protagonist in the series is now Eddy and Eleanor's young 
stepsister, Georgie Dorian, who has so far aged from about four 
years old to ten or eleven).  In non-fantasy books children age, 
too, such as K.M. Peyton's "Flambards" books and her books about a 
horse-loving girl named Ruth who eventually becomes pregnant and 
marries a piano prodigy/ex-con named Pennington.  And then there are 
the Anne of Green Gables books, by L.M. Montgomery.

My son also loved the "Indian in the Cupboard" books, and the 
protagonist in those books ages as well.  In fact, the only two 
series in which the children DON'T age that I can think of are 
things that are clearly just being pumped out to make money: the 
insipid Magic Treehouse books and the Boxcar Children books (which 
are written by a slew of authors now, as I said, just to make money).

My kids, however, have noticed that children aging is the exception 
and not the rule in the comic pages of our newspaper.  They've 
noticed that only the kids in For Better or Worse, Jump Start and 
Baby Blues are growing older (although they're growing very slowly 
in Baby Blues).  I didn't point out to them that people age in 
Doonesbury too, as they're not really interested in that strip yet.  
In Rex Morgan, M.D. people seem to be aging in geological time... 
Weren't Rex and June engaged for about fifty years? <g>

--Barb

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Psychic_Serpent
http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Barb

Come on over to the Psychic Serpent group to read the Valentine's 
Challenge fics and Chapter 12 of The Lost Generation--Lily and James 
get married!