Caroline Adderson

In my 2010 novel, The Sky Is Falling, I tagged a pair of characters as “a Jo” and “a Beth.” If you’re a fan of Little Women, you’ll get the reference. You might also assume that I had read the beloved American classic. I hadn’t. I consulted Wikipedia’s plot…

Literary fiction has a lot to learn from genre. I discovered this myself when I started moonlighting as a children’s author. Genre I define as a form of writing that follows certain unbreakable rules, and kidlit is one. Like a lot of genre publishing, not only is kidlit going strong, but it is liberatingly versatile and form pushing despite its…