Review of The Age Between: Personal Reflections on Youth Fiction

In lieu of an abstract: Aidan Chambers has a multifaceted place within children’s and young adult literature. A major novelist, pioneering critic, founder of an innovative publisher’s imprint, co-founder of an equally important scholarly journal – any one of these achievements would have earned him a respected place in our discipline. In combination, they make him uniquely qualified to speak on the world of young adult literature. This collection of essays and reflections is therefore fascinating in a variety of ways that mutually reflect upon each other; what Chambers the critic has to say about (for example) Mark Twain or Francoise Sagan will also enlighten us regarding the practice of Chambers the novelist, while Chambers the novelist’s notes on his craft have implications for our understanding of the genre, its audience, and its terminology. Chambers begins his book with an autobiographical account of the first 15 years of his career as a writer, which is also, effectively, a brief history of the development of literature for young adults generally. Neither the author’s progress nor that of the genre was without its setbacks and false starts, and any prospective author might be both encouraged and daunted by Chambers’ sometimes painful experiences and his determination to progress.