I'm writing a story with animals but its not your typical cutsie bunny flopsy. The plot is not overly complex, nor is it too simplified and most characters are animals (there are a few humans). I've read that the max age for animal stories is 10 and usually accompanied by illustrations. Would a lightly older child say 11-13 year olds read such stories if it was written at their level of language? Does anyone know of any animal-based stories written for ages 10+? Thanks.
Why do you want to use talking animals? Usually there would be one of 2 reasons I can think of—to appeal to young children, or to encode a message in something that looks like a children's story that would be unacceptable (or dangerous) to show directly. For instance a story involving violence against children might be much more acceptable if the children are talking animals rather than humans. There may be other reasons I'm not thinking of right now. I'm trying to think of why Secret of NIMH and Watership Down used them. Possibly mimicking (or using) the allegorical form to make a story more palatable, I'm not sure. I'm not familiar enough with either to say. The reason Gene Roddenberry made Star Trek science fiction, and that Rod Serling made the Twilight Zone dreamlike low-budget fables, is because the censorship of the time didn't allow them to deal openly with social issues thay wanted to explore. But it was more palatable using green-skinned people or shifting things to a more fabulous or fantastical setting. It's also why Pierre Boulle wrote Planet of the Apes, to comment on slavery and racism, plus I suppose unethical treatment of animals, and just the idea of what makes somthing human as opposed to an animal. It allows people to think about those ideas in a speculative way, rather than immediately howling with rage.
Wasn't this gone through on one of the OP's other recent threads? The idea that animal stories are mass-produced cheap entertainment for small children is relatively recent (I blame Beatrix Potter) - animal characters have always been parodic; always been adaptable to any age-range (perhaps they even show how stupid the whole concept of age ranges is); and there are mountains of recent ones for the 11-13 age group. Shardik. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cervantes. Homer's Iliad. Jack London. Genesis 3. The Bloody Chamber. I am a Cat. James Herbert. Art Spiegelman. Tolstoy. Gogol. Chekhov. Bulgakov. Janacek. Alberto Vazquez. Duncton effing Wood. John Berger. La Planète des singes. Daniel Quinn. Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī. Aristophanes. Yann Martel. Pratchett. Melville. Poe. P.G. Wodehouse. A Street Cat Named Bob. Maf the Dog. Robert Burns. Paul Auster. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. I'd go so far as to suggest the person who wrote they were for the under 10s was a blithering illiterate.
Because my story is about animals. Its a story about how the hero saves their community from the antagonist. I am trying to ask in the forum if anyone is aware of books with children that are written for age 10+. Insights on how best to appeal to an age group that is slightly older than the norm for animal stories.
Was this in response to my question? I was asking why you want to use animals instead of people. Maybe you aren't sure, but it's something you should think about. There are good reasons. I'd be interested in a discussion about those reasons as well, there may be more than I mentioned above. @evild4ve the idea wasn't explored very thoroughly on that thread (though it could have been). Perhaps this thread could be merged with it? And I suspect when you say parodic you mean something very similar to what I mean by allegorical.
Here's an article about animal stories that looks interesting. Also lists many animal stories: Why is animal fiction important? It looks like Watership Down was written to explore ideas about religion that would have brought serious backlash if written with human characters.
And from what little I remember about Secret of NIHM it was to condemn scientific experimentation on animals. I think animal stories that aren't for children are generally expected to deal with issues like these, and anyone reading them will be looking for thorny social or ethical issues to be embedded.
Sorry, I meant that the talking animals start off in ancient literature (and continue to this day) as a way of signalling to the audience that the writer is sending up, mocking, or deconstructing another style, form, or writer. Which is still often to get laughs, but can take an unlimitedly serious tone too: as with Watership Down's or Maus' treatment of the shoa, or animal experimentation as with The Plague Dogs. As talking animals are adopted across from drama and poetry into the novel, I think they become more complicated than the original fairground mirror effect, or the implication that 'even the mice know...' some of the ones I listed are certainly more allegorical than parody, it's just that parody is where I'd trace their DNA back to.
Here are my thoughts from a Jungian perspective on why today's society believes animal stories are only for children. The farther you go back into the past (when animal stories were far more common and not specifically or always just for children) we were much more in tune with the natural world and with the unconscious. But now scientific thought has largely displaced religion and other unconscious kinds of thinking (myth, fairy tale, fable, etc). Which is bizarre since they don't cover the same territoy at all. Science is about the physical world, while religion and the myths that illustrate it are much more internal (about the inner world) and work through metaphor to carry deep intuitive wisdom that can't be explained scientifically. Today many people, especially the most highly educated (and especially the intellectuals) have only contempt and disadain for all that right-brain wisdom that they can't dissect and measure and that can't be verified by science. Of course they often have contempt for science as well if it doesn't fit their narrative (this is true for anybody pushing a narrative). The over-educated tend to distrust intuition, they've become entirely left-brain logical creatures. And the deepest wisdom such as religion, myth, fairy tale etc comes to us entirely intuitively. Often the people who created the stories didn't consciously understand the wisdom, but they felt it. That isn't always trustworthy of course—but the stories that have withstood the test of deep time (religion, myth etc) and are still with us are the ones that contain the most profound human truths. Often told through animals. In schools and through mass media ordinary folk are fed the disdain and contempt of the intellectuls (who run those institutions), and so they also come to have contempt for all that was dreamed up by our forbears in those ancient times. That plus the fact that many adults simply have no capacity for imagination and intuition anymore, and consider it childish and silly. It's because of the shift from largely right-brain (imaginative) to almost entirely left-brain (logical) thinking that's occurred in our civilization. With the coming of science we've largely forgotten the equally important but very different imagination and intuition. They should co-exist, but there's a tendency when one gains too much power for it to decide the other is the enemy and to attack it.
Silverwing series One for Sorrow, Two for Joy (might be for a bit older readers as it involves gruesome murders and rape) Guardians of Gahoole Its been a while since ive read these but i dont remember them having pictures in them (except Guardians of Gahoole, which had pictures in the inside covers of what each owl looked like) Theres even an adult cozy mystery series involving talking animals. And it you really want to count manga.... Beaststars.... Eta: after reading Xoics posts about the animal stories having deeper meanings.. i agree. One for Sorrow, for example, draws parallels to the Holocaust. The crows are the Nazis and the smaller, weaker birds that they kill, like the MC's sparrow family, are the Jews. Beaststars tackles race... The carnivores are feared by their herbavore classmates because one of the herbivores was savagly murdered by a carnivore on campus. Silverwing tackled abuse and abandonment. Guardians of Gahoole.... The young owls were literally in a reeducation camp
I would say yes. Look at The Wind in the Willows -“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.” some of the most beautiful writing, not at all dumbed down for a child. Who then was Kenneth Grahame's target audience?
Thank you to everyone for their comments and book titles. The examples provided me the reassurance I needed to gauge whether I was on the right track . With perseverance, I hope I can finish my story. Cheerio !
Watership Down was horrendous! Animal stories run the whole gamut of Dr. Seuss through to Animal Farm. But for 10-11 year olds, try Charlotte's Web.
I don’t know what people think about this, but I guess it depends upon what you mean by animals. Fantasy is filled with anthropomorphised non-human characters (Orcs, fairies, etc). One could ask “why orcs and not humans?” but it’s because we have a set of tropes surrounding that type of being. Using the way we think about animals can be an easy short hand that is good for kids, but we continue this into adult literature too. There’s no big difference- in my view- in making your characters hobbits or mice, so long as your point is “the meek little guy can sometimes be the strongest if they have enough heart”.
I suppose it depends what kind of people you're talking about. It's hard for me to remember being that age range (I failed to notice the OP said 10-13, I noticed only 10+), but I know I was reading and loving books with murders in them. They were pulps that were bing reprinted by Bantam as paperbacks, so probably intended for a basically adult readership, but you know—pulps. So sort of adolescent range. And I consider 10-13 to be early adolescence. I definitely wasn't reading the children's type stories anymore, though some might. I'd say by 13 I was definitely ready for something at the level of Secret of NIHM. Something with early adult level themes and ideas, and some scary stuff and the threat of death. Of course these days they treat adolescents like young children and believe they need to be pampered and coddled and protected from everything. But some adolescents might need it (especially if they've been raised by today's standards). But look at what was published as children's stories in earlier times, like say Treasure Island. Kidnapping, piracy, murder, etc. It definitely wouldn't pass muster in children's publishing today.
It just occured to me....Maus by Art Spiegelman. The mice are Jews, the Germans are cats, Americans are dogs. A Holocaust biographical fiction, but with animals instead of people.
When I was about 10-11 years old, I remember reading things like Bunnicula, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Black Beauty , My Side of the Mountain, etc. (most of those target the 8-12 year old range). I have no doubt that if you make your story written for the appropriate age group you're trying to reach then it can be a hit. Most people enjoy animals.
maybe. In the introduction to my addition, Adams recounts reading a book about rabbits and that forming the germ of the idea. The mythological elements in the story aren’t central at all, and religion plays an even smaller role. Watership down is fundamentally a story about rabbits; it could not be translated to humans, and in that I think it’s somewhat unique.
It doesn't have to be central. I'm just saying that authors and filmmakers have a long history of inserting ideas likely to bring censorship or controversy in material normally associated with children, at a deep or somewhat hidden level. It could definitely be a story about animals (rather than them standing in for people) and also have a somewhat controversial take on religion or whatever included in it. I've never read it myself, I was just passing along what was said about it on the website I linked to in that same post (or the one directly above it?)
