Letter: Librarians who can recognise a teenage fiction winner

Sir: The point I made in my Saturday review article, that a book about a serial killer murdering homeless teenagers in London was an unsuitable choice as winner of the Carnegie Medal for 'the outstanding children's book of the year', has not been addressed by either of the two correspondents whose letters have appeared in your columns (19 and 20 July).

The Library Association needs to take note of the quite distinct needs of teenagers and children, not quibble over 'an' and 'the'. And Alan Gibbons needs to ask himself whether his vision of the state of England is more realistic than mine. 'Poverty, racism and violence' do indeed haunt the country. They are not yet, thank God, anywhere near as common as prosperity, generosity and kindness. But children who have to watch our astonishingly gloomy television news and read books like this year's Carnegie winner could be forgiven for believing that they were. Many parents will testify to their deep depression, expressed in a tendency to turn away to fantasy in the form of cartoons and Gameboys.

Adults have a duty not just to explain the world's problems to children, but to offer them hope, and to put those problems in perspective. Too many 'issues' novels, Stone Cold among them, fail to do any such thing. Small wonder they sell in such tiny numbers (mainly to libraries), and children turn back to the boisterous empowering morality of Roald Dahl - and indeed to that perennial favourite, so derided by Mr Gibbons, Enid Blyton.

Yours faithfully,

CHRISTINA HARDYMENT

Oxford

20 July