Never judge a book by its cover.. or its width!
- Girl Reading by Jessie Willcox Smith
You know how sometimes someone says something and you can’t let it go? You keep going over and over the conversation in your head, getting more and more wound up? In the end you tell yourself to stop being silly and to get a grip but the words are still rankling? That’s happening to me today.
It’s silly really. On Saturday, when I was at the football tournament, a young girl came bounding up to the gazebo where my Girls FC books were becoming as damp and despondent as the rest of us. The girl - maybe 10 years old - was really keen to buy one of the books. ‘Please,’ she kept saying to her mum and pointing to ‘Do Goalkeepers Wear Tiaras?’ ‘Please buy it for me.’
Mum picked up one of the other titles, her eyebrows arched. ‘They’re not very thick are they?’ she pointed out. ‘You’ll have finished it before we get home.’
‘Please,’ the girl repeated, shivering in her football strip as the wind blew through the gazebo.
‘She’s reading Twilight,’ the mother said, as if to explain her reluctance to part with £4. Once again she leafed through the book while I talked to the girl about the Twilight books and films. She’d read all the titles and seen all the films apart from New Moon. The mother, meanwhile, continued to fan through the paltry fare in front of her. It took all her self-restraint not to sniff dismissively at my clearly feeble efforts. Four quid for this? she was thinking. On yer bike. ‘Come on,’ she said to her crest-fallen daughter after her final plea fell on stony ground, ‘let’s go.’
Where can I start with how strange that entire episode was? Aside from Meyer’s sagas not being age appropriate for starters, that is. I wouldn’t mind so much if I’d been doing the hard-sell. I’d spent most of the day, in the rain, watching the matches. I chatted to parents and teachers not about the books but the football. There was no pressure to buy. The books were there if anyone was interested, away from the pitch, away from the officials recording the results, away from the burger bar. In other words, not cynically or even centrally positioned, despite my publisher sponsoring the U11s Girls competition.
Anyway, the girl came to the book stall on her own, at a quiet time between matches. She clearly wanted a book. She said so enough times. Had that been my daughter, I’d have been delighted that she wanted me to buy her something so brilliant and worthwhile as a book. Something that wasn’t full of sugar, salt, batteries or e-numbers. But there was no shifting the mum’s position. She was resolute.
Afterwards, I wondered about this adult’s criteria for book buying. How she thought it had to be thick or it wasn’t value for money. Statistically, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer is three times the width of Do Goalkeepers Wear Tiaras. Its spine is 2.2 cms wide compared to my meagre 0.9 cm. Page for page, Twilight wins, no doubt about it. Other titles that are equally poor fare, width wise, include:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis (0.9 cm)
The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler by Gene Kemp (0.7 cm)
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (0.5 cm)
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitzyn (1.0 cm)
The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (0.4 cm)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brody by Muriel Spark (0.6 cm)
…point made, methinks.
The other thing I wondered was whether the mum intends to apply that same fiscal model to other aspects of her daughter’s life. Imagine when the poor girl takes home her ‘Edward.’ ‘He’s a bit on the skinny side, isn’t he?’ Her mum might point out.
‘Yes, Mum, but he’s really nice.’
‘Never mind that. Dump him. Find someone with a bit of meat on them. Somebody thicker.‘
‘Yes Mum.’
You know what I wish I’d done now? I wish I’d given the girl a book. Just given her it as a present to take away and read. So what if she’s finished it by the time she got home? It doesn’t matter, does it? As long as she enjoyed it.