Titles on ‘Tender Topics’

Everybody has heard of the childhood classic “The House That Jack Built.” Now read its gritty urban counterpart, “The House That Crack Built.”

Students at Rosemont Avenue Elementary School in Echo Park can check it out at their library, where the book’s dark illustrations of drug abuse and broken lives rest on the same shelves as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s idyllic tales of the prairie.

Such books--with titles like “You’re Not My Real Mother” and “I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much”--are not uncommon in fiction written for children ages 5 and up. These tales transform what are normally shameful family secrets and modern realities into lessons in literacy and living.

Known among publishers and booksellers as “problem” or “tender topic” books, these works have become a small but important genre in school libraries. Some are metaphoric, while others feature frank depictions of what some children have to face every day.

For instance, in “The House That Crack Built,” which has sold 70,000 copies at $6.95 each, one page shows a screaming baby’s pained face over a poem with a familiar cadence:

This is the baby with nothing to eat

Born of the girl who’s killing her brain

Smoking the crack that numbs the pain

...Who lives in the House That Crack Built.

While the theme seems out of place in Rosemont’s cheery school library, librarian Jesus Zamarripa says that it and other tender topic books address conditions that are all too common in the lower-income neighborhood. Of the 1,400 students in the school, about 90% qualify for Title I assistance, an education program targeted at the poor.

Brad Rumble, Rosemont’s Title I coordinator, likened the 20 or so tender topic books scattered throughout the library to contemporary “in-your-face” fairy tales where not everyone lives happily ever after.

A sampling shows that while some of the books have positive resolutions, the bigger problems--divorce, dependency and disease--go unresolved and characters just have to deal with them.

“Fairy tales can teach children how to make good decisions,” Rumble said. “Some of these more current books hit these hard themes dead-on. You can’t underestimate the power of these books to teach children about the world around them.”

To be sure, these themes resonate with students in all income groups and neighborhoods, not just the inner city. Yet on a recent day, Rosemont students weren’t exactly clamoring for the titles. “Don’t Hurt Laurie” and “My Big Sister Takes Drugs” were still on the shelf, while all of the Amelia Bedelia books were checked out. There was a run on “Clifford the Dog” and other childhood classics as well.

But every now and then, a child finds a tender topic book for herself. Computer records say that somewhere at Rosemont, a student has checked out “My Mom Can’t Read,” a fictional account of a child’s experience with her mother’s illiteracy.

Teachers rarely use these books in their classrooms, but they are available to augment lessons if a need arises in the life of a child, said Marilyn Robertson, who reviews and recommends books for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Robertson said she doesn’t know which of the district’s 419 elementary schools have ordered the books, but the volumes are on the district’s approved reading list, and she has yet to receive a complaint about their content.

Judith Vigna, a former New Yorker who lives in rural eastern Pennsylvania, has written about a dozen short children’s books on sensitive topics. Among her titles are “Nobody Wants Nuclear War” and “My Big Sister Takes Drugs.”

In her 40-page illustrated book “I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much,” an alcoholic father builds his daughter a sled for Christmas but is too drunk to go sledding.

“I wish, just for once, that we could have a real Christmas,” the girl says. Daddy does not recover, so the daughter sleds with her mother instead.

“I think that books have to be very straight with children and tell them what to expect,” Vigna said. “Alcoholism is a disease that can’t be cured easily. The child is powerless to do anything about it. But the one thing she can do is to take care of her own needs as much as she possibly can.”

Vigna has been writing such books since 1980, when she published “She’s Not My Real Mother,” which is about divorce. Vigna said she wrote the book after realizing that children were being affected by divorce but had no books of their own to explore the subject.

“A lot of people were not quite prepared for this kind of book,” Vigna said. “But once these books came out, a lot of teachers and parents asked, ‘Why didn’t we have these books before?’ ”

No one knows for certain the effects these books have on children’s lives, but Vigna said she has witnessed some impact. She has read the book about the drinking daddy aloud to small groups of schoolchildren. She said the children opened up, talking about how they sympathized with the main character and relating their own experiences with alcoholic parents.

Vigna’s small, independent publisher, Albert Whitman & Co. of Morton Grove, Ill., prints about 80 books on subjects ranging from changing schools, racism, HIV and hate crimes to domestic violence, homosexuality and autism.

About three-fourths of them are purchased by schools and public libraries, and their titles read like a catalog of today’s social problems: “Don’t Hurt Mama,” “Alex, the Kid With AIDS,” “All Alone After School,” “My Body Is Private” and “If Daddy Only Knew Me.”

Then there is “Dry Days, Wet Nights,” the saga of a young bunny with a bed-wetting problem.

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