Happily Ever After

Michael Chabon’s new book, “Summerland,” is the reason the Pulitzer Prize winner became a writer. When he was 10 and 11 and 12, the boy that Chabon was dreamed of writing a book about adventure and magic, myth and heroism. A book that incorporated all the things he liked to read--”The Chronicles of Narnia,” “Harriet the Spy” and Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising” series--but with American kids. For 25 years, Chabon imagined that book. What he couldn’t imagine was any publisher wanting it.

Then came Harry Potter.

“Before, if I had gone to my agent and said, ‘I think I’ll write a kids’ book,’ the reaction probably would have been, ‘Are you sure you want to spend a year on a book I may not be able to sell?’ ” Chabon says. “But now the reaction is, ‘Hmmmm, what a great idea.’ ”

Harry Potter, who conjured billions of dollars in book sales out of an age group everyone assumed was functionally illiterate, has facilitated another miracle--the American adult-kid crossover author. Joyce Carol Oates has a young-adult book just out, and this fall, Chabon’s “Summerland” will join a pantheon of first-time kid-literature efforts: “City of Beasts” (HarperCollins) by Isabel Allende, “Coraline” (HarperCollins) by Neil Gaiman and “Hoot” (Knopf) by Carl Hiaasen.

Coincidence may have some part in the production of such a list, says Diane Roback, children’s book editor of Publishers Weekly. “I wouldn’t call it a huge trend,” she says. “But the success of Harry Potter has shown a lot of people that children’s fiction has never been more vibrant.”

The marketing of fiction in America, says Roback, is highly segmented, and people who don’t have children have no reason for perusing the children’s section of their local Barnes & Noble. “It is very difficult to market an all-ages book here,” she says. “Or to market a young-adult title to adults.” In Europe, she says, things are not so highly segregated--a novel is marketed, and read, as a novel rather than a young-adult novel or a children’s book.

“They have a very different tradition of reading in Europe,” she says. “I was just in Italy, and ‘Stargirl’ [a young-adult title] was on display right along with the adult fiction. And many adults were buying it.”

This might explain why many British writers have moved fluidly from adult to children’s fiction and back again, but very few Americans have. Mark Twain and E.B. White managed quite well, but few modern writers have attempted it because, quite simply, the publishing world did not encourage it.

Hiaasen says he was shocked that Knopf, which publishes his satiric mystery books, was willing, even eager, for him to write a children’s book. Especially since the idea had come from an editor at competing HarperCollins. “I thought it would be interesting--a writer should always try new things,” he says. “My agent was for it but thought we should check with Knopf because they have been so good to me. I didn’t think they’d be interested at all, but they were, and suddenly there I was, committed.”

Big names have been making their way onto the shelves of the children’s section for a number of years now, but most of them would be more likely to have been nominated for an Oscar or an Emmy than a Pulitzer. Jamie Lee Curtis is working on her fourth children’s book, John Lithgow on his third; coming soon are first-time efforts from Marlee Matlin and Spike Lee and the reissue of a story penned by a 13-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.

Many of these books are good, says Roback, but they do not herald the potential broadening of minds and markets as “Summerland” or “City of Beasts” does. “These are books by talented writers, wonderful writers. Kids won’t care who the author is if it’s a good book, but adults will,” she says. “And whatever gets a reader into a different section of the bookstore is a good thing.”

The writers seem equally delighted with the opportunity. “It’s a natural idea for a writer,” says Chabon, “if you have children or even if you just have fond memories of certain books from your childhood.”

“Summerland” is almost exactly the book he dreamed of writing when he was a child. In it, an 11-year-old boy goes on an epic quest into a magical land where good can triumph only by superior skill in baseball. The characters had been hanging around in his imagination for almost 25 years, Chabon says, and when his eldest child, Sophie, began reading chapter books, he decided to finally let them out.

Neil Gaiman (“American Gods” and “Stardust”) also began writing “Coraline” for his daughter Holly, who was 5 at the time. But the book took a bit longer to write than he thought, and when he finished 10 years later, it was aimed more for his daughter Maddy, now 7. The result is an eerie tale about a girl who finds a door to a world that is almost like this one but not quite.

“I wanted to write a book they would enjoy when they were older,” he says, via e-mail. “A book that no one else had written.”

Isabel Allende, whose works include “The House of the Spirits” and the more recent “Daughter of Fortune” and “Portrait in Sepia,” had written several storybooks at the beginning of her career that were published in Chile. With all three of her grandchildren now of chapter book age, she decided to write something for them.

“I have great respect for kids,” says Allende. “Some [writers] tend to talk down to them, but they are much smarter than most adults because they are open-minded.”

After years of writing historical novels, Allende returned to her magical-realism roots with “City of Beasts,” a tale of a boy who goes on a mystical adventure in the Amazon with his travel-writer grandmother.

Eleven years of telling her grandchildren stories made it easy for Allende to write for the 10-and-older set, and the experience was so exhilarating that she plans for the book to become a trilogy.

“It was wonderful, so free,” she says, “like going back to ‘House of Spirits.’ I wrote it happily, playfully and fast. Magic realism is perfect for modern kids because they like magic but they want it explained.”

Hiaasen had a little trouble at first. He wanted to write a story that would deal with themes and issues similar to his adult work, that would include the satire he has become known for. “But I didn’t know if I could take myself back and paint with new eyes, to see what I saw as a child rather than an adult.”

He talked a lot with some of his friends from childhood, men and women who still live in Florida, and that helped a lot. “I remembered what it felt like to grow up in Florida, to watch while our little patch of paradise was paved over before our eyes.”

After that the book came fast, in about seven months, which, he says, is a record for him. In “Hoot,” a series of pranks continuously slows down the construction of a pancake house on a lot that is home to a tribe of burrowing owls, and the discovery of who is behind the destruction teaches the main character a lot about life and himself. Hiaasen says he and his friends pulled a lot of stunts similar to those in the book and that the anger they felt when the lots they played in, and hunted snakes on, were turned into strip malls was exactly that of the heroes and heroine of the book.

“Kids at that age are great,” he says. “They haven’t been messed up by getting an MBA and having folks tell them it’s all right to work for Philip Morris peddling products that kill people. They seem to have a tremendous clarity about what is right and what is wrong.”

All of the authors say that for once it wasn’t the opinions of their agents or editors or even reviewers they feared, but those of the kids. Chabon read portions of the book in progress to his daughter and was amazed at her ability to retain detail.

“She saw a lot of little things, continuity-wise, and I made one really egregious mistake that she caught,” he says.

Gaiman wasn’t worried about making the book too scary or disturbing because, he says, children have a much higher capacity to cope with horror, death and monsters than adults do. And when he gave the book to a bunch of kids and adults to read, he was proved right. “The kids read it as an adventure; the adults, however, complained of bad dreams and having to go around the house turning on all the lights.”

Allende could not send an early draft to her grandchildren--she writes in Spanish and they read only English--but she sent copies of the manuscripts to five schools in Spain and asked for feedback. Because of what the children said, she made a lot of changes, she says, including a new ending.

“They wanted more about the animals,” she said. “They are very into the ecology. And they didn’t want so many things left open. But this is supposed to be the first of three, so I had to leave some things open, but I tried to tie others together.”

After Hiaasen gave his final draft to his 14-year-old stepson, he retreated to his office to bite his nails for several days. While he was happy to finally have written a book without an R rating for language and content, he knew that a negative response would be “the most crushing review I would ever get.” Instead, he got a thumbs-up--”the ultimate compliment from a skateboarder.”

If he was pleasantly surprised to find how much fun it was to write for kids, Hiaasen was amazed by the almost antithetical attitudes of the adult and youth publishing worlds. “With my regular books, you’re watching the [bestseller] lists right away because you have like a four-week window to know if your book is going to tank or not,” he says. “But [the publishers of children’s fiction] are talking about building sales year by year, about keeping a book in print, about whether it’s going to cross generations. For an author’s ego, this is very soothing.”

Chabon and Allende have already committed to at least two more children’s books. Gaiman would like to do another, and hopes it will take him less than 10 years this time. Hiaasen, however, is waiting to see what the kids think. “I’m really going to have to connect with kids, go into classrooms, I guess,” he says. “Because the reviews are important but not like what the kids think.”

If they like “Hoot,” he says, he’ll definitely give the genre another go. “If they don’t,” he says with a verbal shrug, “I’ll just continue doing this other sick stuff that I do.”