It could be timing, partly? When I taught undergrad composition for a few years (roughly 20 years ago now), a few students chose a Mahy novel for their short diagnostic two-pager, but I myself, only a few years older than most such students, missed her work entirely at the "right age." Looking at Wikipedia's bibliography, I suspect her books just weren't visible around greater LA until YA began to emerge, early 1990s (because I didn't see them! whether on public library featured-book tables, or bookshop shelves and their precious endcap space).
Though I was a kid observer, I was in the region where Buffy's writers and production team lived and worked, and I'm only a few years younger than they are, in turn. It's hard for me to see how Mahy would've had much direct impact on them; buying a book for offspring or a nibling doesn't necessarily mean reading the purchase oneself.
(What my former students really picked on for the diagnostic was Lowry's The Giver, which they'd been assigned sometime in grade school. Lowry and Mahy are roughly of an age. No one would've assigned Lowry to me in terms of Lowry's stature then, and I was in college as of The Giver, though I did read at least one Anastasia Krupnik title in the late '70s or early '80s.)
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Date: 2024-09-05 06:16 pm (UTC)Though I was a kid observer, I was in the region where Buffy's writers and production team lived and worked, and I'm only a few years younger than they are, in turn. It's hard for me to see how Mahy would've had much direct impact on them; buying a book for offspring or a nibling doesn't necessarily mean reading the purchase oneself.
(What my former students really picked on for the diagnostic was Lowry's The Giver, which they'd been assigned sometime in grade school. Lowry and Mahy are roughly of an age. No one would've assigned Lowry to me in terms of Lowry's stature then, and I was in college as of The Giver, though I did read at least one Anastasia Krupnik title in the late '70s or early '80s.)