I know I had something specific to write about Mimus, but now I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Must have been great, though.
One interesting thing that I can think of now, but which isn’t the thing I was going to write about before, is how rarely I wind up reading translated YA stories from Europe. I mean, I certainly don’t seek them out, but I can’t off the top of my head think of any recent stuff other than Cornelia Funke’s books. When I was a kid, I read a lot of stuff in translation: the Pippi books, Emil and the Detectives, The Swiss Family Robinson, the Moominbooks, probably other things I’m not thinking of at the moment. But now, I don’t see them very often.
Lilli Thal has evidently had a big hit with the Komissar Pillermeier series, which isn’t in English yet, and has at least one more fantasy adventure book. And after the success of InkStuff, I suspect that publishers have their eye on the possibility of cheap money. And of course when I was a kid I was reading a century or more’s worth of translated stuff, so the current sparseness is probably an illusion.
Still, considering how much of our Storybook stuff is straight out of Grimm—well, no, not straight, very distantly and indirectly out of Grimm, but still with the basic building blocks—I’m surprised that there aren’t more Italian or French or German or Polish or Hungarian YA novels about the Marchenwald showing up in the library. Or, of course, maybe there are, and I’m just not seeing them.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.