Awards time always brings to mind the issue of categorising books for children. Junior fiction is a particularly fraught categorisation, because it stretches from books for first readers who are around 6, to books for 12-year-olds. As junior fiction and picture book writer Kyle Mewburn says, “All categories are false constructs, really. There’s a huge difference in content, language and themes between a story written for 6-year-olds, versus one written for a 12-year-old audience.”
The Read talked with Helen Wadsworth from the Dorothy Butler Children’s Bookshop and Mary Sangster from the Original Children’s Bookshop about the finer points of middle-reader categorisation and how they choose what to recommend for each age group. We also discussed definitions and book series with author Kyle Mewburn. Read on.
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