by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Across the Gender Lines: Writing Historical Fiction that Appeals to Boys and Girls

I’ve always thought of myself as a girly-girl writer. Although I’ve 10 biographies for kids that appeal to both boys and girls—many of them in the popular Who Was… series—my real love is girl-friendly stories; no fewer than five of my children’s books have the words doll or doll house in their titles. I’m also especially partial to stories involving Jewish girls, as the protagonists of The Doll With the Yellow Star, The Doll Shop Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop will attest. If there was a problem here, I failed to see it and would have been happy to keep spinning my Jewish maidele stories as long as there were audiences for them.  

But a chance meeting with an editor from Boys’ Life produced the first crack in my frilly, feminine facade. We had been invited to speak together on a panel; when it was over, she encouraged me, strongly, to consider writing fiction for the magazine. I was flattered but didn’t think I was the right person for the job—it was too far out of my comfort zone. But an invitation from an editor is something to take seriously, so I began to play around with some ideas, eventually settling on a story set in 1941 that was slated for their December, 2016 issue. That month marks the 75th anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, and in my story, a 12-year-old boy finds himself defending his best friend, Kenzo, whose Japanese family had arrived in the United States some 10 years prior. It was about the need for facing down prejudice and bigotry and it advanced a message of tolerance and acceptance. The editor liked what I had written and asked for more stories, which I was happy to provide.

So when I was tapped by an editor from Scholastic to write what eventually became The Bicycle Spy, I had already taken some tentative, baby steps across the gender line. Scholastic wanted a book about a 13-year-old boy who lives in the southwest of France during World War II. His parents own the bakery in town. Unbeknownst to him, they are members of the French Resistance and he’s been delivering the messages that they  have baked into loaves of bread. He’s an avid cyclist and fan of the Tour de France—suspended during the war years. The protagonist also had a new friend in school and when he learns the truth about her family—that they are Jewish—is called on to help them escape. These were the bare bones supplied by Scholastic—the rest was up to me.

I was now faced with writing a book whose primary audience would be boys, a much more challenging and complex task than writing a 1200-word magazine story. If I was going to succeed, I needed to widen and expand my range as a writer. This made me very nervous. Could I sustain a boy’s point of view and hope to engage boy readers for an entire chapter book?

To my surprise, I found the task less daunting and more exciting than I expected. I wanted to make my protagonist, Marcel, appealing and relatable, so I turned him into an unlikely hero: small for his age, bespectacled, and the unhappy target of the class bully’s teasing and aggression. Marcel loses to his best friend in a game of chess, flubs the occasional answer in class and dreams constantly of being stronger, taller and faster—like the winners of the bicycle race he reveres. And yet, for all his flaws, he’s also shown to be brave, loyal and determined. 

As Marcel’s story evolved in my mind, I realized I wanted it to include a female component, something that would appeal to girls as well as boys.  And so I began to develop the character of Delphine Gillette, the new girl at school who loves cycling as much as he does and is revealed, midway through, to be Jewish. Her family has fled Paris and is hiding out in this small town, protected by the false papers her father has been able to procure. But when the Nazi presence intensifies, Marcel learns that the papers of the residents, particularly those newly arrived, are going to be scrutinized carefully. Delphine and her family are no longer safe. They will need to flee again, and it is Marcel who is instrumental in the daring plot to help them find their way to freedom. So there was my Jewish girl, and although she was not front-and-center all the time, it is her story that is pivotal to the plot and her family’s dire situation that allows Marcel to shine.

As I wrote, I tried to keep the concerns of both boys and girls balanced in mind. I knew that boys would like the suspense aspects of the story, the coded messages, and the workings of the Resistance movement, as well as the descriptions both of the occupying soldiers and of the French gendarmes who supported them. I also made sure to include details about Marcel’s relationship to his parents—his mother’s worry and occasional tendency to nag, his father’s pride in his courage—as well as the push-and-pull with his school friends. For the girl readers, I explored Delphine’s experiences as the new girl in town, her efforts to fit in and be liked, but also her spunk and her courage. I added references to the clothes she wore—because, yes, girls do care—and her affection for her pet cat.

But as I got deeper and deeper into the story, I also began to notice a certain softening of gender lines and to realize that the concerns of these two characters were more alike than different. They both loved cycling, worried about their place in the social pecking order, and had to deal with parental expectations. Both faced the awful upheavals of war and both feared an uncertain and potentially devastating future.

I had started out believing that boys would relate to Marcel, and girls to Delphine; I came to see that each of these characters would have appeal for the other gender. It’s a revelation that I hope to carry with me when I approach my as-yet-unwritten next book. Writing for boys taught me something about writing for girls and I am glad to have discovered that that universe of fiction is far broader—and more inclusive—than I had formerly imagined. 

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Yona Zeldis McDonough is the award-winning author of the seven novels and twenty-six books for children. She is also the editor of two essay collections and her short fiction, essays and articles have appeared in numerous national and literary magazines.  Visit her atwww.yonazeldismcdonough.com or www.facebook.com/yzmcdonough. 

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