Today Teens

Teen-age fiction.This year's fiction for teenagers, like most books for young readers, was characterized by overwhelming seriousness. Hardly an issue that currently concerns society-drugs, divorce, dissent, Vietnam, education, ecology, runaways, revolt, reform-missed mention in at least one novel. But most were books of the moment, polemical sermons that often sacrificed both story and theme. The only truly notable novel was John Donovan's Wild in the World, a taut, starkly moving portrait of the last surviving member of a New Hampshire mountain family, his lonely and silent existence, and his friendship with a dog.Nonfiction for teenagers.Topical books poured out, patently aimed at the current activist, reformist sentiments of youth. But some of the best books were biographies that focused on the movers and shakers in history and pointed out that the fight between radicals and right-wingers is not a new battle. Particularly successful was Olivia Coolidge's mature and masterf
ul Gandhi, from which the whole man emerges, and Alix Shulman's To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman, a biography of the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century crusader for birth control, feminism, pacifism, and draft resistance who earned the epithet 'most dangerous woman in America.'Death.Strangely, five children's books dealing with death appeared this year. All eschewed the religious approach for the humanistic, and although the authors' attempts were commendable, none of their books were truly successful.Drugs.Arnold Madison's calm, clear Drugs and You, for ages 8-12, was a welcome volume as drug use kept spreading to younger and younger children. Hard facts about hard drugs were given by Anita MacRae Feagles' The Addicts and James Berry's Heroin Was My Best Friend, each containing tape-recorded interviews with former addicts. Dorothy V. Whipple's Is the Grass Greener? Proved to be among the most inclusive, in-depth surveys to date on drugs
.Black books.The best of the books written specifically for black children were works of fiction by black authors. And while the question of whether black English is a valid grammatical form continued to confront educators, June Jordan's poignant teen-age novel, His Own Where, about a boy and girl from a New York City ghetto who fall in love, ignored the debate and put black dialect to effective literary use. Toni Cade Bambara's Tales and Stories for Black Folks is a lively collection of fiction by contemporary American writers, brimming with tears and laughter, the dignity of being human, and the delight of being alive. African writers are featured in Third World Voices for Children, edited by Robert E. McDowell and Edward Lavitt. The book is a rich sampling of short stories, poems, and folklore from, in addition to Africa, New Guinea, the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown lingers in the mind for the deceptively
soft, gentle style in which it gives a tough and uncompromising portrayal of two eighth-grade dropouts in New York City. For younger children, John Steptoe's Train Ride uses pictures and piquant words to accompany some small boys from Bedford-Stuyvesant, a New York City slum, who venture on the subway to sample the sights and sounds of Times Square.Picture books.Some of this year's picture books for the youngest contained dazzling displays of artistry that bedeviled the eyes. Two books portended an unwelcome turning toward disoriented, disjointed images that might ultimately frighten many children. For Eugene Ionesco's Story Number 3, Philippe Corentin provided beautifully executed surrealistic illustrations expanding on a little girl's and her father's verbal fantasies; and for How the Mouse Was Hit on the Head by a Stone and So Discovered the World, Etienne Delessert created poetically literal extensions of young children's musings about the universe.Some of the most succe
ssful picture books, however, were nostalgic, evoking New England family picnics and songfests, county fairs, and country stores. Clyde Watson's Father Fox's Pennyrhymes is a passel of lullabies and jingles, enhanced by Wendy Watson's detailed drawings of foxes in denim and calico. Author-artist Tasha Tudor created a charming fantasy 'peopled' with corgis, cats, rabbits, and boggarts, Corgiville Fair, that ends with fireworks on the Fourth of July. Mother Goose rhymes enjoyed a revival; collections of 'forgotten' melodies, as well as expanded, 'classic' collections of the familiar rhymes, appeared this year. For pure fun, there was Donald Barthelme's The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn and William Pène du Bois' Bear Circus, in which hopping kangaroos sit still for the koala bears' show.

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