Author finds joy in summer reading
Your teachers wanted you to read during the summer. So did your parents.
And so does Kate DiCamillo. But at any age, it shouldn’t feel like an assignment. It should be a joy and a privilege, says the best-selling and award-winning author.
“We had a tree house when I was growing up in Florida,” she says. “That’s what I think about when I think of summer reading. Going up in the tree house with its trap door shut and just reading and reading.”
Summer reading connotes a delicious sense of freedom for her, as it does for kids and many adults.
“I always say that when I was a kid, I read without discretion. If it was a book, then I loved it.”
DiCamillo’s books have sold more than 30 million copies in 40 languages. Her popular “Raymie Nightingale” is now in paperback.
Two of her books have been made into movies (“Because of Winn-Dixie” and “The Tale of Desperaux”) and two have won the prestigious Newbery Award (“Flora & Ulysses” and “Desperaux”). “Winn-Dixie” won a Newbery Honor, and “Tiger Rising” received the National
Book Award. “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane” is being adapted for stage by the Minnesota Opera.
For children 8 and up, DiCamillo’s acclaimed stories could transport them into the worlds of a lovelorn mouse, a fortune teller or a superhero squirrel and their endearing friends. “Raymie Nightingale,” despite its title, is about a girl, not an animal. (Although a cat rescue does figure in the plot.)
DiCamillo also writes early chapter books, including those featuring the pig Mercy Watson, and has three picture books. This fall, she has a new picture book coming out as well as a novel, “Louisiana’s Way Home.”
But don’t expect DiCamillo to push her own titles for summer: “I never suggest my own, but I’m happy if you read them.”
At 54, she still finds success surprising. “It’s all unbelievable,” she said by phone from her home in Minneapolis. “There is still a part of me that is still hoping to get that first book published.”
Consistent through most of DiCamillo’s novels are real-world emotions.
In its review of “Raymie,” in which a girl’s father has run off with a dental hygienist, Booklist wrote:
“As in her previous award-winning books, DiCamillo once again shows that life’s underlying sadnesses can also be studded with hope and humor, and does it in a way so true that children will understand it in their bones. And that’s why she’s Kate the Great.”
Often her stories’ characters have lost a parent. DiCamillo’s own father left the family, and she and her brother were raised by their mom. But absent adults also work as a plot device for many children’s writers.
“When the parents are out of the way, then the action starts,” she says. “It makes things possible.”
But she also follows the dictates of writer Katherine Paterson, saying a children’s author is “dutybound to offer hope.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t tell the truth. The truth is, the world is a very complicated, painful, beautiful place. To not tell the kids the truth seems a real disservice because they are living right here, and it’s right in front of them.”
Although many of her books involve animals, DiCamillo, as a girl, tended to avoid choosing such novels.
“The richest piece of irony is that the 8-yearold me would not read anything with an animal on the cover. I saw Wilbur’s face on the cover of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and thought, ‘Something terrible’s going to happen to this pig.’”
She shied away from it and other animal tales after reading the painful story of abuse suffered by the horse in “Black Beauty.” Now she rereads “Charlotte’s Web” every year, trying to figure out how E.B. White wrote such a masterpiece. (And she recommends it for summer reading.)
She did love White’s “Stuart Little.” “He’s a mouse with a set of clothing on, so I thought he’ll be OK.”
As a child, DiCamillo also became obsessed with a biography of George Washington Carver, which she checked out of the local library in Clermont, Florida, over and over. (When her mom asked the librarian if they could just buy the book, she was told, “Oh, Betty, you know it doesn’t work that way.”)
The love young kids have for a certain book is like a “subterranean” connection in their body or soul, she says. When DiCamillo worked in a bookstore, adults would come in looking for a childhood title. If she found it for them and put it in their hands, it was “almost like their knees buckled.”
“The books you connect with in childhood have an outsized reaction that you carry with you for the rest of your life.”
Her own loves also included Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books and William Péne du Bois’ “The Twenty-One Balloons.” And her dog, Ramona, is named after Beverly Cleary’s famous character.
Today, DiCamillo often recommends books by Kevin Henke or Rita Williams-Garcia.
And her tips for encouraging reading are pretty basic.
She says parents often “forget that one of the most important things is for children to see us reading for our own pleasure.”
Of course DiCamillo’s own mother read to her and bought her books, so she’s also a big fan of families reading together, which can include siblings reading to a younger child or kids reading to an adult at the breakfast table or in a car.
“Reading, particularly in the summer but also year-round, should never be something like a task; it should be a joy and a privilege. Because it is a privilege to get to do it.” She tells kids: “You’re so lucky you get to do this, and you’re so lucky you have the time to do this. As an adult, I would love to be able to read for a day.”