Too old for toys, too young for boys
'Beacon Street Girls' books, set in Brookline, offer true-to-life stories for readers at an in-between age
LEXINGTON -- Like any other devotee of the Beacon Street Girls, Addie Swartz is leaning forward in her seat, eager to learn the next plot twist in the ongoing saga of Charlotte Ramsey and friends.
She is entitled to her curiosity: It was Swartz who founded a company to launch the book series about a group of fictional girls in Brookline. But at the moment, she seems less a CEO than a breathless reader.
So when editorial director Roberta MacPhee says an advisory panel of youngsters wants to see Charlotte return to Paris to hunt for her missing cat, Orangina, Swartz seems intrigued. And when MacPhee detours into a discussion of other potential story lines, Swartz can't help blurting out: ''What happens at the end? Does Orangina get found?"
MacPhee replies that the editorial team hasn't decided that yet. ''I want to know what happens!," Swartz, 44, exclaims with a half-embarrassed laugh. ''You've hooked me in!"
Join the club. With its quintet of likable, believable seventh-graders, the ''Beacon Street Girls" series is a literary alternative and antidote to a culture in which young girls face constant pressure to emulate that dreary bimbocracy whose totemic figures are named Britney or Paris.
By welcome contrast, the Beacon Street Girls rely on a combination of smarts, good humor, and dogged loyalty to cope with the insecurities, dilemmas, and life-changing events of junior high. The target audience of girls age 9 to 13 will probably recognize themselves in Charlotte, Katani, Maeve, Avery, and Isabel because -- as with Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik series -- the ''Beacon Street Girls" books are loaded with heart, rooted in reality, and careful to steer clear of saccharine, too-tidy resolutions. The special quality of friendship in seventh grade, and the importance of dreams at that age, are themes woven through the stories, whose titles include ''Worst Enemies/Best Friends," ''Bad News/Good News," ''Letters From the Heart," and ''Out of Bounds."
Swartz's own story will be familiar to any parent who fears that Hollywood and Madison Avenue are intent on erasing the barrier between childhood and adulthood. It is her response to that disquieting fact of contemporary life -- partly as protective mother, partly as innovative entrepreneur -- that is unique.
A few years ago, when the older of her two daughters was 9, Swartz grew dismayed at how the child was ''being pushed toward things and images and all kinds of products that were well beyond where she was developmentally." In films, on TV, in advertising, ''some of the images out there were oversexualized, trying to make her go from 9 or 10 to 18 with no stop in between," she says. So Swartz asked herself: ''Is there an in-between place that could be really cool and really fun but provide good role models and keep her young a while longer?"
The answer she eventually came up with was ''Beacon Street Girls."
Determined to, in her words, ''build a healthy, more positive brand for preteen girls," she founded B*tween Productions Inc. in 2002. She recruited experts from the realms of books, media, and toys and fashioned them into a team that created the characters who have been the protagonists of four full-length novels. Two more are slated for publication this year, and the company has also published six mini-books of fewer than 40 pages. It also sells games, backpacks, jewelry, stationery, and other merchandise linked to the books. Swartz says she is contemplating an animated TV version of ''Beacon Street Girls."
A total of 40,000 copies of the four novels have been distributed since May, Swartz says, including reorders for the first three books. ''Independent booksellers tell us that girls love the books and keep coming back for more," she says.
She does not appear worried that the ''Beacon Street Girls" team will ever run out of stories to tell, in part because the years between 8 and 13 are such eventful and dramatic ones for girls. With her daughters now 13 and 9, Swartz notes, ''I am personally living this age range all the time.
''In that stage between toys and boys, there's a lot that happens. This is a time that can be celebrated," Swartz says. ''My idea was to create, in a fictional world, these stories and characters they could identify with -- reaching them with good messages and sound advice sort of buried in a hot-fudge sundae -- about certain situations they might get themselves into. I felt it was really important to have an alternative for those girls and those parents who want age-appropriate material that is really fun."
Characters that connect
Swartz does not write the books herself. The writing duties are handled by several authors, all of whom labor under the pseudonym Annie Bryant. But Swartz and her creative team are deeply involved in helping shape story lines and character development. Swartz makes sure the books contain messages about values, problem solving, making sound choices, handling peer pressure, and interacting with friends and family members.
If that sounds dry and didactic, the ''Beacon Street Girls" books are anything but.
The students at the fictional Abigail Adams Junior High (modeled on the Edward Devotion School in Brookline) have distinct personalities. The messages -- don't shortchange your ambitions, be true to yourself and to your friends, give something back to the community -- are subtle rather than preachy and do not take a back seat to the absorbing stories.
The junior high idiom rings true, as does the role of technology as connective tissue in their young lives (Internet chat rooms, cellphones). The books have a strong sense of place: One book, ''Out of Bounds," revolves around the girls' fight to save a movie theater, modeled on Brookline's fabled Coolidge Corner Theatre, from closing (a battle the Coolidge itself has had to fight). Nor are the Beacon Street Girls immune from some of the toughest issues kids face. ''Letters From the Heart," for instance, traces the impact on Maeve when her parents separate.
Rachel Simmons, author of ''Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls," praises the series for presenting girls who make mistakes but are not bratty, unethical, or manipulative, as she says many characters marketed to girls tend to be.
''What I like about 'Beacon Street Girls' is they're talking to real girls about real girls," says Simmons, who founded the Girls Leadership Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. ''In this market of reality TV programming and really extreme stereotypes of girls, the value of that really can't be overstated."
Swartz says she wanted the characters to be ''realistic yet aspirational," and to present a portrait of ''what our society will look like in 20 years." Consequently, they are a diverse group: Katani is African-American, Isabel is Latina, Avery is Korean-born, and Maeve and Charlotte are Caucasian. ''We wanted to dispel a lot of stereotypes," says Swartz, noting that Katani, for instance, lacks skill at sports but more than compensates with her financial savvy. The books are set in Brookline because, Swartz says, the community ''offers this great multicultural world."
Some readers have made a personal connection with the characters, judging by letters that address them as if they were real people. In a letter addressed to Charlotte, a 12-year-old named Jessica alludes to a cafeteria calamity that befalls the character in the first book when she first moves to Brookline and assures Charlotte: ''I wouldn't have laughed at you on the first day of school." The letter adds: ''I wish we were friends. I always wanted a friend who loved to read, who was educated and had a heart of gold like you."
That is just the kind of response the creators were looking for. Amy Boesky, the author of ''Bad News/Good News" and ''Letters From the Heart," says it is crucial that readers ''see them as potential friends" and that ''the messages that come across have to come from lived experience."
''The girls are by no means perfect," adds Boesky. ''The hope is that kids will end up identifying with their dilemmas. They're not treacly or preachy. The kinds of situations they're confronting are more appropriate for girls 9 to 12 than the stuff that ends up in the media a lot of times."
Boesky, who wrote more than 50 of the popular ''Sweet Valley High" books, is now an associate professor of English at Boston College. So during the week she lectures students on Renaissance literature and the poetry of John Milton, and on weekends she immerses herself in the seventh-grade world of ''Beacon Street Girls."
It is an imaginative task made easier by the facts that Boesky has two daughters ages 10 and 13 and that the 45-year-old Chestnut Hill resident traverses nearby Beacon Street during her frequent jogs. Boesky's role as head writer is to write many of the future ''Beacon Street Girls" books and help conceive new story lines. Like Swartz and the other members of the editorial team who work on the series, she seems animated by a sense of mission.
''There's a barrage of images that are out there for young kids," says Boesky. ''But there's something that reading does. The power of engaging with a text is one of the most important things for boys and girls, but it's particularly important for girls."
An entrepreneurial itch
Swartz, the woman behind this project, is both a born entrepreneur and someone who has always been drawn to books.
When she was 12 (the age of the Beacon Street Girls), Swartz built a small business -- Addie's Apple Pies -- baking and selling pies to restaurants in her native Rumson, N.J. One restaurant wanted to put her pies on the menu; another asked if she could provide 10 pies a day during the week and 20 a day on weekends. At that point her father put his foot down, and her sideline came to an end.
At Stanford, she majored in English. But after she graduated in the early 1980s, she felt drawn to the business world. She got an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and went to work for the
Stints followed at the Rockport shoe company and at the computer company Lotus. When Swartz had her first child and went on maternity leave, so many friends asked her about good educational software for their children that she founded a company, BrightIdeas Inc., that sold such software nationwide. Swartz was featured on ABC's ''Good Morning America." In 1996, Addison-Wesley bought the company. Swartz stayed on for a couple of years as a vice president, then took some time off to be with her children. By 2001, she was getting that entrepreneurial itch again.
On this recent weekday, Swartz and MacPhee are joined by the other employees of B*tween Productions -- Pam Esty, Ellen Cunniffe, Katie Barron, and Kirby Crum -- for an editorial planning session. The atmosphere is loose and relaxed as they kick around future book ideas over salads, Diet Pepsi, and potato chips. No one seems worried about disagreeing with the boss. When Swartz maintains that ''we need to introduce another main boy," MacPhee demurs, saying the series needs to focus on the main characters.
They talk about potential plot developments for books seven and eight -- should one of the other Beacon Street Girls accompany Charlotte to Paris to hunt for her cat? -- and sometimes draw on their own memories of middle school. It is a time when, Barron notes, ''you stop being friends with people in middle school for small things that become big things." One possible story line involves a science fair that pits two of the friends against each other (and explores the themes of competition and the pressure to succeed). Swartz confesses that, in sixth grade, her entry in a science fair was a volcano with ketchup ''erupting" out of it. She was trounced by a classmate who entered a homemade ham radio. ''Have you recovered from that?" asks MacPhee. Swartz laughs and replies: ''No! No!"
Swartz instructs MacPhee to go back to the advisory board of youngsters and find out which story line resonates more: Charlotte's quest to find Orangina the cat in Paris, or the science fair. Just before the meeting ends, Barron ventures one more idea. What if Avery, the animal lover, should decide to take advantage of a little-known statute and graze a cow on Boston Common?
Swartz is delighted. ''Now, that would be hilarious," she says. ''Katie, do some research."
She mulls the idea some more, then adds, as though she is speaking of a person who has become very real to Addie Swartz the reader: ''That would be so Avery. I love the idea of her fighting City Hall."
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.
