Note: this is the second of two three companion posts to Episode 44 of my podcast, Children’s Science Fiction. (I told you, this episode took a lot of research.) For the first post, click here.
Today, children’s books—especially fiction books—are grouped into different markets based on age—chapter books, middle grade, upper middle grade, and so forth. On its face, that sounds sensible, because a fifth-grader is going to be able to read more complex texts than a first grader and will be able to handle a wider range of subject matters. The thing is, this didn’t used to be the case. Little more than a half century ago, you didn’t see those divisions. Instead, there were others; picture books were still distinct, but there were “boys’ books” and “girls’ books” with rather sharper lines between them than we have now. The age-based markets weren’t really a thing.
This was one of the surprising things I learned while researching my upcoming podcast episode on children’s science fiction. Reading level seems like a natural way to divide up books, but that entire paradigm is a fairly new one. It grew up out of the shifts in the children’s book industry in the 80s and 90s. (Or at least, it grew up alongside them. I don’t have direct evidence, here.) During this time, children’s fiction was pushed more in school through the Scholastic Book Fairs, and for schools, children’s publishers (not just Scholastic, but also others like Harper-Collins) began breaking books down by grade level—or rather, by reading level.
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Science Meets Fiction 