Ann Rinaldi: Historian and Storyteller

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2001), "Ann Rinaldi: Historian and Storyteller", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 4, pp. 201-201. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.4.201.1

Historical fiction often has to fight for readers but often demonstrates some of the very best writing for children and young people: think of Bette Greene and Rosemary Sutcliff, Mildred Taylor and Scott O’Dell, Henry Treece and Paula Fox. Ann Rinaldi is well known in the USA, with 25 or so very impressive novels, and undeservedly less well known elsewhere. Her gift for bringing history to life relies partly on meticulous research (into subjects like the American Revolution, slavery, cotton manufacture, the lives of people long ago) and partly in breathing life into history. She creates characters young readers can identify with even if they are not American, and situations with wider meanings and relevance – accepting who you are in Cast Two Shadows (1998), becoming a whole person in Mine Eyes Have Seen (1998), following your own destiny in Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons (1996), relationships between fathers and daughters, and coming of age. Her own childhood is vividly fictionalised in Keep Smiling Through (1996).

Rinaldi has won awards (several American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults, and Wolf by the Ears, 1991, as Best of Best). She presents challenging moral dilemmas for her (mainly female) central characters, but dilemmas, like the rights and wrongs of war or slavery or witchcraft (she wrote a book about Salem called A Break with Charity in 1992). One of her characters is the daughter of a Sioux chief (My Heart is on the Ground, 1999, provoking controversy about authenticity). Her teenagers are universal, her situations ageless: she finds her stories in history (interview with Ann Rinaldi at http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/special/ kay/rinaldi1.htm), “invents in history when history doesn’t provide information”, and “establish an historical protagonist and a conflict that young adults would be able to identify with”. Wolf by the Ears (1991), the story of Harriet Hemings, a slave at Monticello and the supposed daughter of Thomas Jefferson, not only reflects themes of racial alienation, but shows how historical facts get distorted by the way people see things. It has also led to some controversy among biographers in the wider world, wanting to keep that US hero whiter‐than‐white.

This is the second in the series: the first is a study of R.L. Stine, the author of Fear Street and Goosebumps and the Baby Sitter books (called What’s so Scary about R.L. Stine?, by Patrick Jones, published in 1998). Jeanne McGlinn, the author of this study of Ann Rinaldi, is a professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and has produced a well‐researched work here, good bibliographically and critically, and likely to bring Rinaldi to the attention of many librarians, teachers, and young people who don’t yet know about her. Get for your library if you resource any group, professional or general, interested in the extensive background to young adult literature, and historical fiction in particular. Go also to the Internet School Library Media Center historical fiction page at <http://falcon. jmu.edu/∼ramseyil/historical.htm> as well as the Rutgers Web site (above), to see what more can be found.