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A Different Sensibility?

Article Excerpt
Thank you so much for your words about Inanna,' Groundwood Books editor and publisher Patsy Aldana said fervently. She was greeting Michele Landsberg, one of Canada's most influential reviewers of children's books, at Groundwood's twenty-fifth birthday party. Landsberg had enthused about Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer on the CBC--Canada's equivalent of NPR even drawing out the flagrant joy in Inanna's ebullient self-esteem ("[Inanna] was delighted with her breasts / and her vulva. / She was exuberant and she loved herself"). "The book really hasn't received the attention I'd expected in Canada," Aldana said. "It's done much better in the U.S."

In the U.S., Inanna received respectable treatment--with praise for its pictorial resplendence, verbal vitality, and its qualities as an "unusual and powerful point of access to ancient myth for young adult readers" (Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books). Amongst others, reviewers in the Horn Book, Ruminator Review, and VOYA gave it serious, positive attention. It's on the Amelia Bloomer Project list of recommended feminist books and under consideration for ALA's Best Books for Young Adults.

Why, I wondered, did Canadians ignore it? Are we more prudish? Shy about goddesses? Narrow-minded about sacred stories?

The real issue, it turned out, wasn't one of prudishness but of placement. Is Inanna a children's book? But it's so sexually forthright, so mature and strong-minded. Is it an adult book? But it has pictures! This, it seems, threw some Canadian reviewers and booksellers off. Inanna was neglected by some journals and relegated to a short blurb (rather than a considered review) in others.

In the months since the Groundwood party, Inanna has garnered some full, positive reviews in Canada. But still, Aldana's comment started me wondering. Would Canadian and U.S. reviews of Canadian books show a difference in national sensibility? I began to read through the files of some of Groundwood's more daring (in literary and artistic terms) publications. I talked with editors and publicists at several Canadian children's publishers--Groundwood, Annick Press, Orca Book Publishers, Tundra Books, Kids Can Press.

What emerged is not easy to interpret, but it's thought-provoking. Houses whose publications are less daring in style and often content, such as Kids Can Press (the home of Franklin the turtle, among others) and Orca Books (which has recently moved away from its original identity as a Pacific Northwest publisher), couldn't recall any works that had drawn markedly different critical attention along national lines. Andrew Wooldridge, editor at Orca, noted only that Shelley Hrdlitschka's problem novel Dancing Naked has done remarkably well in the U.S., much better than in Canada, and has been nominated as...

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