Lately, the question of audience has been on my mind.  As in "what is the audience for this particular book?"  It seems that several books I've picked up lately are murky on that topic.

For example, Peter Sis has a critically-lauded picture book out, titled The Wall.  It's about his life growing up in Prague during the Cold War, the suppression of creative ideas, the inescapable control of communism, and the struggle he endured.  The book is very large, the illustrations (he wrote and illustrated) are detailed but are mostly small, with many to the page, and the story is rather dark, after all, we're dealing with oppression.  He refers to concepts, events, and pop culture icons that today's kids won't know, and I hate to admit there were some that I didn't even know about.  Thus, who was this book written for?  Do elementary grades study the Cold War nowadays?  Or is this a book written for the adults in the publishing world?  I don't know.

Another book that has some people asking "who is the audience?" is Kathi Appelt's The Underneath.  Described as "really freaky deaky weird" but still garnering praise from Empress of the Librarians E.R. Bird on her Amazon review, the book is one that people either love or hate.  I'm afraid to read it, and my stepdaughter Sarah started it, but says she is having a hard time getting into it.  (She tossed it aside once Twilight finally entered our house.)

Then there are the books I've recently reviewed.  One is the winner of Norway's picture book of the year is and may be the worse picture book I've ever seen, so condescending and trite I feel the author has never interacted with real children.  Another, a young adult novel, tried to include every single Big Issue in the genre: bullying, school violence (i.e. pipe bombs), homosexuality, homophobia, drug use, truancy, dating woes, racism, white privilege, mental issues (in this case depression), domestic violence, and biracial characters.  I think teen pregnancy was literally the only thing left out of the story. 

This all leaves me wondering: who were the authors thinking of when they wrote these books?  And, is anyone else out there having this kind of difficulty with the books you are reading?