It's certainly not how I read when I was young. It's actually a bit of an insult to young readers to assume that a challenging, literary book must automatically be off-putting, and it's not at all my experience of the young readers I meet. Just because you read the latest Booker winner doesn't mean you don't also read the latest Scandinavian corpse-fiest, and vice versa. Young readers are as varied as adult readers, and as eclectic in their individual tastes. But this, I think, works from an incorrect premise: that there is only one sort of child reader. T here are occasionally voices in the children's book world who argue that the kind of serious children's novels that win prizes and get newspaper reviews are, in fact, books that are only loved by prize judges and middle-aged reviewers, not by kids themselves.
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