Food for Thought

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on Apr. 13, 2006 Sign up now!

by Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/13/2006

Authors reshaping their successful adult books for the children's market is not a novel concept. However, two forthcoming such books are worthy of note since, based on their predecessors' success, they may well make a sizable splash in their new market.

With coauthor Charles Wilson, Eric Schlosser has refocused his Fast Food Nation for a teen audience in Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, due from Houghton Mifflin in May. And Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference! by Lynne Truss will appear in picture book format, illustrated by Bonnie Timmons, from Putnam in July. With sizable first printings on order for each of these titles, their publishers clearly expect that kids will devour the books' contents as ravenously as adults did the earlier volumes.

Something to Chew On

Schlosser had several incentives to turn his attention to younger readers. Fast Food Nation, his exposé of the fast-food industry, has sold more than 1.4 million copies in hardcover and paperback since its 2001 publication. And, with their affinity for burgers, fries and soda pop, kids are the fast-food industry's biggest consumers. Schlosser explains that Wilson, who worked as his fact-checker on Fast Food Nation, initially suggested that preteens could really benefit from the information in Fast Food Nation. Schlosser agreed and recruited Wilson to work with him to write Chew on This. "The fast-food and soda industries spend billions of dollars every year targeting children with ads," Schlosser states. "We thought kids deserve to hear a different point of view."

The research process for Chew on This, which has a 75,000-copy first printing, was similar in approach to that of Schlosser's earlier book. Both Schlosser and Wilson did some firsthand reporting and a lot of digging through archival and published sources. The only real difference between the two books, they say, is Chew on This's emphasis on how the fast-food industry affects the lives of young people.

Schlosser, who makes his first foray into the children's market with this book, notes that he did not alter his writing style for the children's book. "Charles and I set out to respect the intelligence of young readers," he says. "We didn't want to talk down to them. If a young reader needs to look up a word in the dictionary, that's a good thing. We left out some of the more gruesome and disturbing episodes included in Fast Food Nation, but on the whole we didn't engage in self-censorship. I think kids need to face some of these harsh realities. They can handle it. And they ought to be told the truth."

Houghton Mifflin will do its best to ensure that kids hear the authors' message. The publisher has, well, supersized plans to market the book. Its $250,000 promotional campaign includes national advertising, a floor display and Schlosser's 10-city author tour that includes a May 4 appearance on Today.

As he reaches out to kids through his book and personal appearances, Schlosser hopes his words will make kids "think about where their food comes from, and how it's produced, and how it affects their lives. And if a young person reads this book and then thinks twice about ordering McNuggets, well, that's okay too."

Comma Commotion

"Becky walked on, her head a little higher than usual," reads the caption that appears under a picture of a swimsuit-clad gal who is clearly content, as she walks away from her turreted creation in a sand castle contest. "Becky walked on her head, a little higher than usual," notes the text on the opposite page, revealing the same smiling child—this time upside down—having reached the summit of an incline by climbing on her head.

In their picture book rendition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss and Bonnie Timmons use divergent scenarios, such as these, to reveal—with abundant good humor—what a difference a comma can make. It is an observation that has evidently tickled the fancy of adult readers of Truss's original 2004 volume addressing the nuances of punctuation, which hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list and has sold an exclamation point-worthy two million copies!

Asked about her inspiration for adapting Eats, Shoots & Leaves for kids, Truss cites several incentives. "First, quite a few people asked me to!" she says (with enthusiasm that warrants this punctuation). "Teachers had told me that children as young as 11 were reading the adult version, but that a humorous book on punctuation for younger children would really be useful to them. Also, in my research I came across lovely old children's books on grammar—a delightful 19th-century pamphlet called "Punctuation Personified" and a wonderful 1940s book called The Grammatical Kittens, in which a couple of kittens were given basic grammar lessons by an old sheepdog."

Unlike her original tome, which Truss describes as "a rather campaigning book, warning the reader about the end of print culture," this native of England notes that her children's book "takes the lightness and humor that characterized the funny examples in the first book, and directs it at smaller people who are just learning that a mark can change the sense of a line of words."

Truss, a journalist who has also penned three adult novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, also muses on what she hopes children will take from her latest book, saying, "It's an odd thing for a writer to say, but I really hope they enjoy looking at the pictures, because the pictures will make them think about the words. The book isn't a grammar lesson, teaching the 27 uses of the comma. Some of the examples show just how a comma can rescue an ambiguous word order. There are so many media that eschew punctuation now—advertising, street signs, the text message, the e-mail—that children need a bit more help to see how print conventions can clarify the written word. And the best way to make that point is to be entertaining."

To help Truss make her point, Putnam will print 250,000 copies and plans national advertising, a floor display, e-mail teasers to librarians, teachers and reviewers and a tongue-in-cheek National Comma Awareness campaign via www.savethecomma.com, a site that will be up and running as the book's pub date approaches.

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