In ~l~bber, when Jill is simply following the crowd and is bullying Linda because It IS what everyone else is dOing, she occasionalIy ponders her actions, but continues to follow Wendy, the popular ringleader.

Looking back, I can now see that I didn't wish to be Margaret or Katherine because I was Margaret and Katherine. But I like to think that Hermione and my illusory Hardy sister were reading Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret just as I was. Even if you are having amazing adventures, you still had to figure out how to navigate your period.

the creative child relies on her literacy to help her re-create herself. She emerges from her dependency on her teacher's perception (or, in this case, her perception of her teacher's perception, an echo of when she dropped out of kinder-garten when she thought Miss Binney did not love her) for her sense of self-worth.

Has Ramona, as Orenstein suggests young girls do, already begun to assimilate the rules about compliance and less aggressive behavior? Can she be identified as a tamer, more feminized child as a result of the persuasive punishments meted out by the school?

Establishing Ramona's longing for the tactile experience of touch-ing Susan's boingy hair sets up what Pat Pfleiger identifies as one of Ramona's "difficulties" as she moves "into a world of complex rela-tionships" outside her family and neighborhood.

Since Ramona is just entering kindergarten and Orenstein's study focuses on eighth-grade middle-school subjects, the lessons on "silence and compliance" seem quite a prediction to make for a strong personality like Ramona. Neverthe-less, as early as the first day of kindergarten, Ramona's behavior con-flicts with the norms of her school community, and readers see the beginnings of the socialization process.

She therefore usu-ally conforms to the strictures of her new surroundings so that her teachers' approval will make her feel loved, especially in the earliest grades. As she progresses from kindergarten through third grade, her either/or mentality leads her to think that her teachers either like/ approve of her or dislike/disapprove of her.

Looking backward in time, we can ponder the question of whether it is the children and teenagers who have changed, as Anne Fine does in the Author Talkback to this chapter, or whether it is our interpretation of and attitudes toward their concerns that have changed. Related questions then emerge regarding how such a change happens; that is, does the literature change in response to the needs of its audience, or does the audience change in response to the literature?

But, some of you may be saying, I am not really all that interested in the history of youth literature; I plan to teach contemporary youth literature to contemporary children, tweens, and teens. Or: I want to write for young people, so my goal is to

"Ever since there were children, there has been children's literature:' While this is very likely true, it requires a feat of informed imagination to reflect on the forms that literature took before print, as well as to extrapolate from the bits and scraps that have been preserved over time in order to make some generalizations about what young readers might have read and enjoyed prior to our present age; well-loved books, like well-loved toys, may not have survived the ravages of time and rough handling as well as those items that were not subjected to everyday use. Yet this kind of imaginative reconstruction is precisely what we must do to fully account for the stories, educative texts, and poetic forms shared with young people throughout the course of human history.