Robin Stevens: “Boys Should Definitely Read Books About Girls, And Visa Versa”
Telling children which stories are ‘for them’ risks turning them off literature completely, suggests Robin Stevens
True story: I actually wrote my first book before I could read. Or write. It’s not as crazy as it sounds; my father and grandfather were both academics, so I grew up with books being created all around me.
As a very little child I’d sit next to my dad and he would scribble on pieces of paper then give them to his secretary, who would type it all out. I deduced from this that the process of ‘making a book’ must be a kind of mind reading, and I wanted to do it, too. I got hold of a notebook and pencil, and ‘wrote’, thinking about a great story all the while. When it was finished, I proudly handed the ‘book’ to my mum; I wanted her to read it, for real, and she couldn‘t. It was quite a shock to realise that there was more I needed to do.
As it happened, I was a little late to read – at least, compared with what the school thought should be happening. I was born in California and we moved to London when I was three. When I was about five and a half, my teacher suggested to my mother that my American accent was holding me back! Of course, my mother took no notice – and shortly after that, something suddenly clicked in my head, and all those squiggles started to make sense. I remember looking at street signs, realising that I could understand them, and getting incredibly excited about making that connection. And then I went mad; with nothing stopping me, I read everything.
One of the earliest books I remember (it feels like it can’t be true, but it is) was The Hobbit. I was lucky, as a kid who wanted to read, to have parents who valued that. We moved to Oxford when I was five, and the library there was a treasure trove, where I discovered Diana Wynne Jones, Eva Ibbotson and Terry Pratchett. To read his Discworld books I needed to venture into the adults’ section and that felt amazingly cool at the age of eight.
My mystery series, about a pair of schoolgirl detectives, is described as Agatha Christie meets Enid Blyton quite a lot. I’m very happy with that – both of those are writers I read hugely as a child. I remember ‘graduating’ from Blyton to Christie, and wondering where the middle ground was; the books about kids solving murders. In a way, Murder Most Unladylike is the book I wish I’d been able to read when I was younger.
I really want my books to be accessible to any kid who is the right age to enjoy them. It seems ridiculous to me that we are increasingly splitting stories by gender; whom a book is about has no bearing on whom the book is for. Hazel, one of my two main characters, is Chinese, and I love the thought that whenever a white person reads the book they’re identifying with her as the narrator, not looking at her as someone different from themselves. This is why I believe that boys definitely should read books about girls and vice versa: seeing the world through someone else’s eyes is a really powerful way of understanding them.
Schools work very hard to nurture a love of reading in their most reluctant pupils – but sometimes I think adults try too hard to push particular books on children. The closest I’ve ever come to a non-positive experience with books was when my teacher gave a list of ‘advanced’ titles to my mother. My mother is very rule-abiding, so she’d only allow me the books on the list itself. I was so furious that I refused to read Skellig in protest – I finally read it as an adult and realised how stupid I’d been. All the same, I was turned off reading it by an well-meaning adult trying to force a connection that wasn’t there. I think it’s so easy to do, albeit with the best will in the world; we need to trust children to find their own way, in their own time.
