I’m still on my mission to write good ‘boys’ books, and have been re-reading some of my own childhood influences. Times change. What was an ‘easy sell to any boy’ then probably would be a lot harder to ‘sell’ to any but the most determined and desperate young reader now.
I think the problem with many of them is slower immersion, and despite the fact that there are enormous differences between modern kids and what would have been the target audience (or at least what the acquiring editors thought would be the target audience), particularly for UK books. They are, many of them, very class related – with it assumed the buyers would (or want to be) modelled on upper-middle class families. Whether we’re talking WILLIAM, BIGGLES or FAMOUS FIVE, things like large family holidays, parents who can afford private boarding schools, often with Military or Colonial Official backgrounds, which I think was always a harder sell in the US, and a lot trickier now.
Much of this – as a kid in South Africa, was quite alien to me, but not to my parents. They bought the books. I was an avid reader, and bypassed much of this in the way people ignore stats in books. It also had a sort of alien charm, with jolly feasts and ruined castles etc.
SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS – the heroes are obviously the children of relatively well-to-do people who can – in the 1920’s afford such things as motor-launches and yachts (Back when for a lot of the population, a motor-car was pretty spiffy). Anyway: what I was finding interesting was that the kids in the story spend a lot of their time ‘Cos-playing’ pirates and explorers (a lot of it dealing with ‘natives’ (adults, local English people) and ‘savages’ (the same but plainly more interesting and not always friendly) who of course had eaten a great many of their enemies. Their discoveries are named out of what their own reading has given them (A high spot is called ‘Darien’, the nearest lakeside town ‘Rio’ and the highest mountain ‘Kangchenjunga’.) Their adventures have real-world elements, but very interwoven with this. Neither the readers nor the characters pretend these are real… but it shapes their behavior, their adventures, and the whole story.
It’s a theme that recurs in the WILLIAM books.
I was trying to think of any American, or even more recent UK books… but other than GOOD OMENS (which draws heavily on WILLIAM) failed to think of anything but CALVIN (playing Spaceman Spiff or the detective, or time-traveler).
I could think of plenty, of course, where the kids faced real dangers, but none where they were ‘acting out’ their favorite stories. I may well have missed them.
Have you any suggestions for me, on this ‘type’? Or do kids just no longer do this?
The picture is from my ‘back-yard’ – heaven to play pirates or hide from savage tribes… if that is still the dream?
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Swallows and Amazons”
It is not recent, since I read it in grade school, but My Side of the Mountain by Jean C. George. The main character starts to act out some of what he has read, and ends up having to build on those in order to survive.
Unfortunately for survey purposes, most of what I read was older (John Bellairs, Lois Lenski,), fantasy and sci-fi (especially British writers), or the so-depressing YA stuff that was being pushed in the 1980s. I don’t have any good suggestions.
That picture is awesome. As an adult, I have a low tolerance for outside, being prone to plant allergies and intolerance of extreme heat and cold, hate bugs, can’t swim, etc. (Once as a boy I explored into a nearby wooded area with a childhood friend, and we ended up disoriented but not exactly lost, so we just picked a direction and kept walking until we hit somebody’s back yard. The woods was only maybe 5 acres in extent.)
But 10 year-old me would have ventured out as far as I dared into that picture.
That was exactly what inspired this post. That and meeting kids who had to basically be dragged to it and had no desire to endlessly play in it, with it.
Some girls’ books dabble in it, like Anne of Green Gables, but I would be hard pressed to think of a male version other than Christopher Robin and his spiritual descendent Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes.
I am not sure, this is what you are seeking, but The Phantom Tollbooth was a truly marvelous boy’s book. (If you are the cheap sort, you can set up and Archive dot org account and borrow a copy from a participating library.)
But he really does go
“Have you any suggestions for me, on this ‘type’? Or do kids just no longer do this?”
Thinking back, my kids didn’t play that way at all. But they’re nerds, and also no other kids in the neighborhood, so it is not surprising. ~:D
Calvin and Hobbes is the only modern example I can think of also, though I came up with some examples from the 1950’s. Oddly, the children in Elizabeth Goudge’s books about the Eliot family, from the fifties, have play-acting, but those books were written for adults.
My grandchildren, who have limited access to screens have done some of this. 1) We showed them the Kevin Kline version of The Pirates of Penzance and they wrote and acted an opera called the Egg White Monster. They were 3, 5, and 7 for that operation. 2) They acted out the Longfellow poem about “the 18th of April in ’75” but their mom was instrumental in encouraging the play-acting as a way of deepening their understanding. 3) They play-act all the time using their legos and blocks, and their vague understanding of Star Wars, derived from books and the lego game online (not from actually seeing those movies).
From this I deduce that you need at least one child with the imagination to get the game going and several other children who can add to the game because they have a shared experience and are willing to get involved. Certain toys help. (Boats helped the Swallows and Amazons…) The grownup role is minimal but vital. Someone has to help them find source material.
I think a modern kid’s book that included some kind of play-acting would be amazing.
Also, Galaxy Quest…!
Maaaaybe The Bridge to Terabithia? But part of it is so depressing that it’s probably not a good example.
I’m not certain enough kids are permitted to roam and imagine, or have places to roam and imagine, that many recent books describe that. When I lived in Nebraska, a creek and “wild” valley backed up to our house and those in the neighborhood, and parents let us roam as a pack, or even on our own. That was the 1970s-80s.
Definitely older (old even when I read it as a tween in the late ’90’s) but I loved Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright as a kid.
I was fortunate enough that we lived on a former farm and I was able to roam what had been the closer fields up to the creek and big old barn so Gone Away Lake really resonated.
I also read The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder in sixth grade English, again noticeably older even in thirty years ago, but I enjoyed it. I think this one might hit the extended storytelling/imagination game you’re looking for.
Otherwise, I read my way through a steady diet of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Patricia Beatty, Lois Lensky, the Dear America series …
As I was switching to SF-F, I met and loved the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede.
Hardy Boys, maybe? I dunno.
I first read Swallows and Amazons as an adult, and what really struck me was how times had changed. The father in the book was an RN officer on a destroyer in the Med, and when his wife asked his opinion of the kids’ wanting to camp on the island for the summer, he replied by cable:
BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN
The kids even discuss how he put in the last five words to reassure their mother