Your Fave Authors From ’90s Elementary School
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This post is targeted at childhood favorite reads for a certain age-bracket. I’m talking to you, old millennials. We learned the old card catalog and are digital natives at the same time. We remember watching TV when suddenly everything had a full web address mentioned at the end of the show. We taught our parents how to use a computer mouse. And we had some awesome kids books in the ’90s, and some of those authors are still writing for kids.
Back in my day, oh about 1995, I could. Not. Get. Enough. Of The Bailey School Kids. Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots, Werewolves Don’t Go to Summer Camp, etc. I love cozy monsters, the kind that want to play baseball and teach social studies. Something about about when the macabre meets the mundane is like catnip to me. Apparently it is for other people too, because Dadey wrote more than 80 books about The Bailey School Kids. The gist of each book is that an adult in the school or town seems to be a mythical/supernatural figure. The kids, Liza, Melody, Howie, and Eddie, try to figure out if this person really is a mythical character. But they, and the reader, are always left with some ambiguity.
There were not a lot of Chinese authors gracing the shelves of my rural library in the ’90s, but Laurence Yep was the most prominent #ownvoices author of Chinese experiences. First published in 1975, the Golden Mountain series follows the Young family between 1835 and 1995 as they move between China and America. He wrote for some of the big series of the late ’90s/early ’00s, such as the Royal Diaries, American Girl of the Year, and My Name is America. But, my main memories of Yep are his dragon books, taking elements of Chinese mythology and spinning them up into fantasy stories. If you love dragons (and I do), Yep is your kind of author.
If you were a kid in the ’90s you can probably picture the Animorphs covers, the ones where the kids pictures sort of creepily changed into an animal as they morphed. My brother had a LOT of Animorphs books (love you, book orders!) and we swapped them as we burned through the series. I think I fell off around book #20 (out of #53), so I don’t even know how it ended. But with topics covering war, morality, leadership, and dehumanization, this was such a solid foundation for science fantasy kids. Also, it was my introduction to Cinnabon.
Even if you tell me that you were too dude-ly in the early-to-mid ’90s and never picked up a Baby-sitter’s Club book, I will have a hard time believing you. This series was everywhere. I’m sure you had a favorite BSC member. I don’t even know how many BSC books I read, including the Baby-Sitters Little Sister series. Revolutionary because it focuses on the lives and concerns of pre-teen and young teenage girls.
