Of the many obstacles facing writers the most cumbersome and ill dealt with is the fact that all children are British upper-class and from the first half of the 20th century. This problem can of course be circumnavigated by not including any children in the story, as has been effectively mastered by many writers. Unfortunately often a writer would want a character a child can relate to and it is well documented that children relate well to children. Thus many authors wish to include children in their stories. In fact it is commonly desirable to have a children as the main characters. How to achieve this has been tackled in several ways in contemporary children's literature. Here we will discuss the pros and cons of the two most common approaches before recommending a third, less common, approach. There are other ways around the problem other than those discussed here but most are basically variants or combinations of the ways we will mention.
If the author happens to be of the same circumstance then this is all well and good. However, most writers these days are not. Some are British; a lot are upper-class and a handful are living in the first half of the 20th century, but the combination of all three is becoming increasingly rare.
The most common way to include children as principle characters in a book is to set the tale in early 20th century Britain and/or her adjoining fantasy worlds. This approach approach has the advantage of having everyone in their right place. You have people from early 20th century Britain in early 20th century Britain; the places and settings match up with the characters and events.
There is however one major flaw in this for the contemporary author. If one is to write a book for public consumption it ought to be worth reading. Otherwise the whole venture will be a commercial failure. Now, if a tale set in the first half of the 20th century is worth telling and worth reading then surely we would have heard it by now. Surely someone, a great author or a hack, would have bothered themselves to commit an account of the events to print. The modern child is sophisticated, more so than many writers give them credit for. They are well schooled in the rules of literature and know what is expected of them. They will gladly suspend their disbelief to any height for a skilled and considerate author. But what writer, no matter how adept at her craft, can expect to find an audience today who will accept that novel events she claims happened one hundred years ago have managed to go unheard of until now? Is the reader expected to believe that there is some sort of organization keeping yarns from the aforementioned time period under wraps and releasing them intermittently at their haphazard and perhaps sinister whim? I think that anyone who relies on this conspiracy theory thinks too little of their audience. Their sherry and port binges have left them scarred and out of touch with the book buying child.
The next most popular option is to set the tale in modern times and our respective adjoining fantasy worlds. This immediately removes the problem of ludicrous conspiracy theories but simultaneously introduces fresh problems. Why does our working class Canadian heroine address her friends as “chums”? Why is our young hero working in the fields in South East Asia dressed in a Public School uniform? Why are our band of young Norwegian vagabonds being evacuated from London when they live in Bergen and London is under no immediate threat? These are the types of questions on the mind of the reader of books in the Modern Day Movement. Such thoughts and questions distract the reader from the narrative and cause disinterest. Why should the reader care if Hattie recaptures the Goat of Power if they don't even believe that Hattie, naturally an upper class British girl from the first half of the 20th century, would have any reason to be in present day Udmutia where she discovered the portal to the savage yet charming fantasy world of Pooltakan? The intelligent child is bored or angry from the start and the author only manages to carry the truly stupid to the end, where no doubt we learn that there is a Goat of Power inside all of us or something inane like that. Of the many authors that have attempted this style of story very few have managed to create anything that even comes close to being worth reading.
The third approach is overlooked by all but the most intrepid of our modern children's writers. It is quite simple really. To overcome the issue having people from the first half of the last century in times and places they don't belong, set the story in the first half of last century. To overcome the issue that all stories from then would have been told by now, retell an old story. To put it simply, rewrite an already written book. The amount the author wants to change the style or order of the narrative is of little interest as long as they are telling us essentially the same story that has already been told. The way children's books are written needs to change, and this is the way it needs to change.
