Essay: The rise of the Midwest in young adult literature

Noted: Great storytelling can transcend setting. Kathleen T. Horning, director of the Cooperative Children?s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that she very much identified with “Harriet the Spy” as a girl, despite the fact that she had never been to New York City. When Horning grew up and finally saw Harriet?s neighborhood, it was “more like going home than when I got back to the neighborhood I grew up in.”