But in writing the Cam Jansens, I saw that there was a gap in the books available for children. There were the easy-to-read books, and there were the eight-to-twelve books for eight- to 12-year-old readers. There was nothing in between. So, either you could make the jump, or you got lost. And what the Cam Jansens are is an intermediate step. And when the first one came out in 1980, there really weren’t books like that. There were two series that came out at the same time, mine and a series by Pat Reilly Giff, the Polk Street kids. Those were really the first two series that were transitional readers.
And people often don’t quite get what makes a good transitional reader. It’s not simply reading level; it’s that the children read one word at a time, very slowly. They don’t skip, and it’s a very determined book, word after word after word. And we have no right, and there’s no reason to rush through reading, but if things don’t happen quickly enough, they get bored. So, since they’re reading slowly, the plot has to move more quickly. And that means you can’t have a lot of description, and the characterization has to come out of something the character says or does – not from the author himself telling you about the character. And that’s what makes the Cam Jansens work – because the child reads slowly, but the plot moves quickly.
And the second thing that makes them work is when children are just beginning to read, they often don’t pay attention to what they’re reading. They puzzle out the words, and when they’re done, they’ve read the whole book, but they don’t know what they read. But with a mystery, you pay attention to the clues, and if you miss the clue, when Cam discovers the clue and solves the mystery, you go back to see if it really was there. So, it trains you to pay attention to what you’re reading.
