What is MG Historical Fiction?

When people ask me what I write, most of the time I say middle grade historical fiction. Because that’s an answer not everyone understands, and it’s not completely true, I thought I’d explain it further.

Middle-grade (MG) fiction does not mean fiction that has been written for readers that are in middle school. Rather, they are books written for readers who are capable of reading more than simple chapter books, but not yet ready for more adult fare. Generally, these are readers between age 8 and 12. These books are often between 30,000 and 50,000 words long. While fantasy and not historical fiction, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is still considered a Middle-grade novel even though it contains close to 77,000 words. On Fledgling Wings, my novel about a boy who wants to become a knight during the Middle Ages, at under 50,000 words, is closer to the MG average, while Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a slim 25,000 words.

MG fiction usually has little or no profanity, graphic violence, or sexuality. If there is any romance in a Middle-grade novel, it is limited to a crush or a first kiss. That doesn’t mean that MG is all sweetness and light. Look at Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, a novel set in WWII Germany and narrated by death itself, or Fever 1793, Laurie Anderson’s tale about the yellow fever epidemic of 1973 in Philadelphia. When a class of fifth graders read The Bent Reed, my novel set during the battle of Gettysburg, the violence that most disturbed them was the death of the family cow.

Because middle-grade readers like to look ahead at what’s coming in their lives, protagonists in MG books are typically on the upper edge of the age range of their readers. The Eyes of the Pharaoh, Chris Eboch’s mystery set in ancient Egypt features a 13 year old, while Hattie Brooks, the heroine of Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson is 16. Jemmy and Raul, the two protagonists of Valverde, my novel set in New Mexico during the Civil War, are 14 and 13 years old.

Finally, Middle-grade novels tend to end happily. While Crispin, the protagonist in Avi’s MG novel Crispin: the Cross of Lead, becomes an orphan, is falsely accused of murder and theft, and must run away to escape execution, he become a free man in the end. Rodzina, the plucky heroine of Karen Cushman’s book on an orphan girl in the American West, finds a home after a long, arduous, and disheartening search. Eponine, the young French girl in my novel Code: Elephants on the Moon loses her horse, but is able to help with the Allied invasion on D-Day and learn some important secrets from her past.

 So why did I say that it’s not completely true that my novels are historical fiction for Middle-grade readers? I’ve written a few books that don’t quite fit the category. My two books in The Anderson Chronicles: Tweet Sarts and Jingle Night are the right size to be MG books, the protagonist is the right age, and they end on a happy note. However, they are not set in the past and are therefore not historical. And Swan Song, my novel based on Beowulf, is definitely not written for Middle-grade readers. At 75,000 words, it is too long. The two intertwined plots, one set in the modern era and the other in the Neolithic period but both based on a 5th century English saga, makes the book more complex than most young readers could tolerate. More important, the content includes two rapes, several violent deaths, and a primitive ritual to release the fecundity of spring. It is definitely too adult in nature for anyone younger than their upper teens.

So yes, I write Middle-grade historical fiction, but I am not limited to that genre. Nor are my books limited to Middle-grade readers. Many adults
have enjoyed my books, even the ones that are labeled as MG. It’s just another example of how you can’t judge a book by its label.

Jennifer Bohnhoff teaches 7th and 8th grade Language Arts in a rural school in central New Mexico. You can read more about her books on her website by clicking this link.

Don’t Let the Stories Die - Jodi Lea Stewart on keeping #History Alive

Cross the Bridge into History

Unique Challenges

Historic novel writing presents many unique challenges. Foremost, the writer didn't personally live during that time era, or perhaps he/she lives in New York but loves writing about the Old West.  Slick documentaries and photos often don’t go far enough to immerse the writer or the reader in the “feel” of that particular slot of time.

Stories from people who are long gone still live on to a degree via the written word through journals, newspaper articles, Bible notes, diaries, even plays. If you are fortunate enough to find someone whose ancestors lived during a particular historic time, say during the Ellis Island emigrant burst, all the better because you’re going to get stories no one else has heard, and most likely, tidbits from a different perspective.

I call those stories, especially the ones obtained first person, the REAL STORIES because they come from the mouths of those who lived them.

Blackberry Road, my latest novel, is a snapshot of a hot summer in 1934 Oklahoma. A girl called Biddy narrates a whopping tale of murder and spookiness that begins in May when school is out and ends when the blackberries are turning brown on the vine – about mid- to late-summer. Biddy’s family jumps right out at you like a real family, and why is that?

Because they are, and I didn’t let their stories die.

Turning 'Real' into Fiction

Collecting family stories, recipes, lore, and copying old handwritten Bible notes over the years created the realistic backdrop for Blackberry Road. Fictional Biddy has twelve brothers and sisters. My mother had eleven. Both Biddys, the fictional and the real, were from sharecropping families living in Oklahoma in the 1930s. 

Dirt poor, but rock solid, those families had to eat, live, and survive everything from snake bites to drought (or flood) to miserable housing conditions.

In my particular case, I was fortunate to mingle and mix with a real sharecropping family because they were my own relatives. You can be sure the stories at our reunions or get-togethers flew around like greased spitballs; and there I was, in the thick of it, laughing and asking questions, my pen flying over the notebook I kept with me at all times.

Most members of the real Blackberry Road family have now passed on, but their lives and experiences will live on forever simply because I didn’t let the stories die. My job as a writer was to make fiction seem like reality and reality seem like fiction. 

You can do the same thing.

No Family Stories to Collect? No Problem!

Don’t despair if you don’t have actual family stories to gather. Story opportunities full of "nuggets" pop up everywhere. All you have to do is cross the bridge, so to speak, and be ready to take notes. 

A chance to record stories “from the horse’s mouth” is as close as that elderly lady you see every day on the bus. Befriend her and see life as it was through her eyes. Maybe it’s a friend’s uncle who served in the military and lived through stories that seem too fictional to be true but are true just the same. 

A person volunteering for a church street choir used to be homeless many years ago – what was that like, and how did he or she escape homelessness? The Vietnamese family down the street who barely made it to the USA in 1971 – how did they do it, and what happened when they got here? 

Your friend tells you she has a grandfather who was a butler in the deep South in the early 1950s. Wow! Can you go see him and make sure his stories don’t die?

You don’t know until you try, right?

At an Early Age . . .

This history-collecting mindset can be encouraged at an early age. Teachers can inspire their students to sit down and talk to their own grandparents and parents to collect stories from long ago, or even a few decades ago. Telling the stories to the class or submitting them as a written assignment wins on all levels. A field trip to a retirement home to sit down one-on-one with the residents and collect stories from times past could turn up historical and entertaining information that might lead to a lifetime of story collection for those students. At the very least, it gives the young and the old a chance to relate and talk to one another.

Librarians are famous for encouraging the young to “dig and dig some more” academically. A contest for the most interesting, newly discovered historic story “as told by” could turn up a goldmine of data! A librarian’s influence on the young to respect and preserve history is something that cannot be measured but is truly a stake in our future.

Living stories are waiting for you, your students, your children, and your friends to discover, record, and save. It’s up to all of us to not let those stories pass away into oblivion.

Two Old Stories That Didn’t Die

“I remember Mom making my dresses from flour sacks and my bloomers from flannel undershirts. She used innertube rubber for the waist and legs. She made me at least three dresses for the year. When I grew out of them and had to wear them anyway, it was sure pitiful.” ~ the real Biddy, age 92.

“It was my job to lead my blind grandma to the outhouse, and I would read the Sears and Roebuck catalog to her while I waited. That’s how, when I was ten years old, I got the second doll of my childhood. We read about her in the catalog, and she cost 95-cents. Grandma bought it for me for taking such good care of her. I thought my doll was the most beautiful thing in the world. She had rubber bloomers, and I kept her hung up on a wall. In those days, we didn’t have screens on most of the windows and some grasshoppers got hold of those rubber bloomers and ate them up. I had to kill those varmints for doing that!” ~ the real Biddy, age 92

Jodi Lea Stewart was born in Texas to an “Okie” mom and a Texan dad. Her younger years were spent in Texas and Oklahoma; hence, she knows all about biscuits and gravy, blackberry picking, chiggers, and snipe hunting. At the age of eight she moved to a large cattle ranch in the White Mountains of Arizona. Later, she left her studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she DIDN’T want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised three children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional western articles, and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. She currently resides in Arizona with her husband, two Standard poodles, two rescue cats, and numerous gigantic, bossy houseplants.

She is also the author of a “Nancy Drew meets Tony Hillerman” trilogy; SILKI: THE GIRL OF MANY SCARVES: Summer of the Ancient, Book One; Canyon of Doom, Book Two; Valley of Shadows, Book Three, set in the modern-day Navajo Nation and featuring a sassy protagonist with an addiction to scarves and a penchant for trouble.

Blackberry Road is a panorama of dirt-poor but honest Oklahoma life as told through a sharecropper’s teenaged daughter. The murder of a beloved teacher stretches into mysterious sounds coming from the woods to beyond the hidden caves of Coody’s Bluff. Before it’s over, the truth brushes shoulders with some of 1934’s most notorious criminals. Blackberry Road is Jodi Lea Stewart’s first historic novel.

Blackberry Road is available on Amazon.

Pitbulls - Their History and a Defence, by Elizabeth Junner and Isobel McLaughlin

Pitbulls - Their History and a Defence

by E.W.C. JUNNER in collaboration with ISOBEL McLAUGHLIN

If you were to take a survey about Pitbulls, 90% of the people polled would call them vicious monsters. Yet half of these people probably haven’t even encountered a Pitbull, basing their judgement on media accounts. The truth is any dog breed can be aggressive; the majority of dog attacks come from animals with vicious and otherwise problem owners.

Centuries ago ‘bull-baiting’ was a popular sport in Great Britain. Though this was mainly for the people’s entertainment, in particular wealthy gamblers, there was a belief that a bull’s meat was tenderer after he had bled profusely. This belief was so strong that some areas in England had a law requiring a bull to be baited before it was slaughtered.

  Before being enclosed in a pit with a dog thrown in to bait it, a bull would be taunted and tormented by the men handling it. The purpose of this was to have the bull already angered, so when the dog harassed it even more there would be a ferocious confrontation between the two.

Well-to-do gamblers (picture - public domain)

 

The dog would flatten itself low to the ground to protect its soft belly, creeping as close as possible to the bull before darting up and trying to nip the bull on either the head or nose. The bull for its part would attempt to drive its horns into the dog’s belly in order to toss the dog high into the air.

The intention in bull baiting was for the dog to grip the bull by his tender nose, thereby to hold him and perhaps bring him down. Tremendous jaw power was necessary for this, therefore the breed usually chosen was a bulldog because of his incredible strength – they were developed as pulling dogs - and powerful jaws. Gambling was a major lure in bull baiting.  On the outcome of each round great sums of money were wagered and fortunes frequently lost.

Since, regardless of their courage, few dogs had the strength and stamina to take down a bull or pull it around a ring, it was very much a matter of who struck first. Once it got a grip of the great animal’s snout, the bulldog hung on for dear life. The harassment must have seemed to go on forever to the enraged and maddened bull as it shook its great head violently from side to side in an attempt to shake the dog off.

(from public domain) see the dog's ribs - probably underfed to keep him aggressive

The gamblers continued using bulldogs in this horrible practice, until they realized that bulldogs were hefty dogs and weren’t agile enough to escape the lethal horns of a bull. There was, however, an agile and fast breed popular in Europe which was called the American Terrier, and so the two breeds were combined to produce the Pitbull – the breed to combat the bull tethered in the pit.

 There had always been a public outcry against the whole cruel spectacle and finally in 1835 this barbarous practice was outlawed in Britain.

What was to become of the dogs? The original British Bulldog was taller than the modern one, but very fierce and not a particularly sociable animal, certainly not suitable as a household pet. So people who genuinely loved the dogs set about breeding them for sweetness of disposition as family pets. Though their legs are now much shorter, their heads are still as broad and wrinkled, their jaws as undershot – and their strength every bit as formidable. The main difference is their lovely, friendly nature.

Another breed similar to the Pitbull is the Staffordshire Bull Terrier. One of the main differences between the two breeds is in height. Staffordshires are roughly three or five inches shorter than Pitbulls. The coat colour is another difference in breed standards. Pitbulls can have any colour of coat other than merle. Staffordshires can be white, red, fawn, blue, black or brindle. Both breeds can have patterned coats. Pitbulls and Staffordshires have very similar body structure,both are very stalwart and muscular breeds, but Staffordshires are on the whole a lighter dog. If you look closely, Pitbulls have shorter muzzles, shorter than the length of their head, and tend to have broader heads than Staffordshires. Both breeds have assertive, playful, faithful and loving personalities. They are highly energetic and will happily join you on an adventure at any time of day. Except, perhaps, if it’s raining!

The  Pitbull features in fiction. Pete the Pup was the faithful American Pitbull used in the Our Gang movies; in 1994 a remake called The Little Rascals featured an American bulldog as Pete.

Pete the Pup (public domain)

Dash

Carol Lea Benjamin’s entertaining and instructive mysteries feature P.I. Rachel Alexander and her Pitbull Dashiell. Aimed at the adult market, they may nevertheless be enjoyed by a literate middle grader. 

 And finally we have Daisy. She had one object in life – to be happy and have everyone around her happy. She loved pop music. She would climb on the sofa, lay her head along the back and nod meaningfully towards the player, her signal she wanted a record or CD played. Her favourites to ‘sing along with’ were Tangerine Dream and Abba. Her soulful “OOooOOOh”in accompaniment has been captured on tape.

It was amazing the number of children who were immediately attracted to Daisy, and she submitted happily to their various demonstrations of affection, however rough at times.When she died, many people, including the town workers, came to offer their condolences. She was one well-loved little dog.

Daisy the well-beloved

To conclude our Pitbull defence we have the magnificent Greyfriars Bobby. Named for the famous little Skye terrier, Bobby, like Daisy, was a rescued dog. Although he’s a big, powerful dog and very protective of his family, he associates well with other dogs, and is calm and obedient. He is also patient, even when disappointed:

Who closed my store???

An excellent all-rounder, his family are very proud of Bobby's  Canine Good Neighbour Certificate, which he gained on his first course in the programme.

Greyfriars Bobby, CGNC.