Shortly before the highly anticipated 2016 Youth Media Award announcements on January 11, the 2016 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction quietly went to The Hired Girl (Candlewick) by Laura Amy Schlitz. The win strikes a chord of redemption after the controversy that had sprung up over a passage in the book, igniting a wide-ranging discussion over whether it’s acceptable for a story’s protagonist to hold prejudices that are not fully resolved or put in context for young readers and how the expression of such ignorance impacts a title’s appropriateness for children. The line in question concerns the main character, 14-year-old Joan Skraggs, a girl working odd jobs in early 20th-century America in an effort to escape her life on a rural farm. When a prospective employer asks if Joan is Jewish, this is her response: I was as taken aback as if she'd asked me if I was an Indian. It seemed to me—I mean, it doesn't now, but it did then—as though Jewish people were like Indians: people from long ago; people in books. I know there are Indians out West, but they're civilized now, and wear ordinary clothes. In the same way, I guess I knew there were still Jews, but I never expected to meet any. The coming-of-age novel, set in 1911 and written in a journal format, is “very much a book of our time, confronting Joan with questions about prejudice and religious faith and tolerance in ways that speak to readers today without trapping itself into anachronism or wishful thinking about the past,” says Roger Sutton, editor in chief of SLJ’s sister publication the Horn Book and chair of the 2016 O’Dell judging committee.  “The judges saw more than a bit of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley in good-hearted but impulsive Joan, and Schlitz shares Montgomery’s ability to keep our respect for her heroine even while we cringe at some of her more ill-advised actions.” Some of the first condemnation of The Hired Girl came from Debbie Reese, a specialist in Native American studies, in a post on her blog, "American Indians in Children's Literature," saying that the fact that the passage constitutes a small part of the text should not insulate it from criticism. “It is ‘one line’ to some, but to Native people or anyone who pays attention to ways that Native people are depicted in children's and young adult literature, those one lines add up to a very long list in which we are misrepresented.” In his own review, though, SLJ’s Heavy Medal blogger Jonathan Hunt made it clear that while he understood what Reese saw as a problem, he didn’t necessarily agree. Declaring that the title remained in his “top three,” Hunt suggested that the passage may actually be more offensive to Jewish readers but defended it as a factor that demonstrates ignorance but an ignorance that the titular heroine is overcoming in the course of the story. When Ann Carlson, librarian at the Oak Park-River Forest High School (IL) and one of the O’Dell judging committee members, was asked how the committee came to the decision, she echoed Hunt in part, commenting on the relatability of Joan. “With the energy of the innocent and as she struggles to understand the world around her, she develops her identity as a teenager and begins to shed her naïveté and prejudices. The committee thought that she was a product of her times,” notes Carlson. SLJ’s A Fuse #8 Production blogger Elizabeth Bird acknowledged that the passage is problematic but argued for its inclusion on the grounds that it adds a layer of complexity to Joan’s character, challenging readers to understand that even sympathetic characters can hold views we don’t agree with. Bird writes: “Let’s say all passages of American Indians were removed (there’s more than one, you know). Let’s say mentions of American Indians were removed from all books for children written about this time period but only when those mentions were prejudiced. Let’s say all American Indians themselves were removed as well. See? Isn’t it so much easier to write historical fiction when you don’t have controversial topics to trip you up?”

A broader debatE

The controversy around The Hired Girl, though, is more than just the discussion of a single title. It comes at a time when more and more librarians, teachers, and critics are pointing out the continuing need for more diversity in children’s books and titles that are more thoughtful when representing cultures other than the author’s. In that context, The Hired Girl finds itself as just one (albeit high profile) title at the center of an industry-wide conversation. The New York Times gave it a glowing review, and the book remains a comfortable best seller at Amazon. Schlitz herself has chosen not to address the controversy and did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Deborah Stevenson, editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and the third member of the O’Dell judging committee, summed up the feeling that inspired the trio to laud The Hired Girl. “We liked that Schlitz kept her heroine of her time. That's less common than you might think. A lot of historical fiction is really disguised time travel, where somebody with contemporary sensibilities appears in an earlier period and wants to progressively make everything the way it is in our era. A book like that can be wonderfully readable in its way, but it distorts both history, by suggesting it was more like the present than it was, and the reading of history, by suggesting that our own time's views are the correct ones that everybody in the past should have been working toward.” The Scott O’Dell Award, created by Scott O’Dell and Zena Sutherland in 1982 and now administered by Elizabeth Hall, carries with it a prize of $5,000 and goes annually to the author of a distinguished work of historical fiction for young people published by a U.S. publisher and set in the Americas. For more information about Scott O’Dell and the Scott O’Dell Award, visit Scottodell.com.