A writer discovers that the right book at the right time can entice even the most reluctant reader

A boy sits in a quiet corner of a school library in North London, struggling to read a picture book that’s meant for much younger students. Although he’s tall and sturdy, and looks older than his 11 years, he’s already fallen far behind his peers academically.

I’m sitting with the boy, listening to him read. The school has a plan to help him. The plan is me.

I’m not a teacher or a literacy expert—although I do, as it happens, write books for teenagers. I’m here as a parent volunteer. As far as I know, this student and the three others I work with haven’t received any extra help in class or from the Special Educational Needs department. I’ve never been given any information to explain the severity of their literacy problems or how they’ve been diagnosed. In fact, I don’t know what, if anything, has been done to help them.

I’ve had one morning of training, where I met the other volunteers—all mothers, mostly middle class. I confessed that I was motivated by self-interest: as an author who had just started writing for teens, I thought it would be interesting to find out why some children find reading so difficult.

I’m also here as an undercover mother who wants to find out more about the school that her daughter attends. Her transition to secondary school coincided with our family’s move from Amsterdam to London, and we had little chance to investigate the local school before she started.

Some of our friends told us we were “brave” to send her to an inner-city school, preferring the more sheltered environment of faith, selective, or private schools for their own children. The faith and selective schools were full up or far away, the private schools very expensive. We trusted that whatever the government offered would be good enough, but when the school asked for volunteers for a new reading-support program, I jumped at the chance to find out more.

According to the school’s website, “More than half of our students are drawn from a wide variety of minority ethnic groups, including Black-Caribbean, Greek and Turkish Cypriot, as well as from the Turkish, Kurdish, Black-African, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Chinese and Somali communities…. Many of our students are bilingual.” Based on standardized test results, the school’s students hover around the 50 percent mark—not great, not terrible. Our trainers emphasize that many of these kids come from homes without books, homes where parents aren’t able to support their children’s reading. Then, we’re given a story with pictures to decipher. “I assume no one reads Dutch,” says one of the trainers.

I laugh, because I do read Dutch. It doesn’t often come in handy, and this time it’s actually hindering his objective, which is to put us in the position of a non-English speaker, trying to decode a story with only strange words and pictures to guide us. I can read the simple Dutch captions quite easily, but as the other mothers puzzle over them, I remember my first six months in a foreign country, the frustration and confusion over the simplest words and concepts (which carton is skimmed milk? Why do the Dutch sell soured buttermilk?), the feeling of being transported back to a preliterate childhood.

After completing the brief training session, there’s a delay: like all volunteers in England, we need to submit to a background check. Two months later, after we’ve been deemed safe to work with children, we’re finally introduced to the kids we’ll be working with. I’m expecting to see mostly refugees, headscarves, behavioral problems, unsavory attitudes, and any number of deprivations. That’s not what I get.

My first reader—let’s call him Freddie—is white, middle class, charming, and confident. His parents are journalists, just like me. ”Reading—it’s OK,” he tells me. “I just never seem to find the time for it.” Freddie’s life is too full of soccer, skateboarding, and friends for him to form a regular reading habit. He’s unenthusiastic about the “easy reader” books that I’ve been instructed to show him, but he picks out a crime story and reads it to me, with no problems. By chapter two, we agree that the book is too simple, too predictable for him.

“I can read much harder books than this,” he explains, making it clear that he finds the whole notion of these sessions insulting. “My problem is that my reading skills aren’t good enough for the books that I like, so I get discouraged. It all takes too long.”

So we read the books that Freddie likes. He stumbles over the long words when he reads aloud, but he’s more than capable of understanding and discussing any text we try. Sometimes I read to him, sometimes he reads to me. I suggest that he treat reading as though he were learning a new skateboarding move—practicing every day—but he still struggles to make time for it. Life is slowing down Freddie’s reading, but when he does read, he’s way beyond the eight-year-old reading level at which he’s been assessed.

We discuss several fast-moving adventure stories by Anthony Horowitz (“Good,” says Freddie, like a seasoned literary critic, “but he doesn’t build the characters very well.”) We progress to books by Mal Peet—books about football, slavery, South America, and journalism, books dense with description and thick with adventure. Multilayered, intelligent, award-winning books. We both love them. We spend one of our 15-minute sessions discussing the pieta imagery at the climax of Peet’s Keeper (Candlewick, 2005), talking about how complicated concepts that take time to understand can slow readers down—but how that’s not a bad thing.

There’s nothing much wrong with Freddie’s basic reading skills. It’s a matter of getting him to remember to read, to concentrate in class, and to somehow translate this into passing the mysterious reading ability tests, which seem to have nothing to do with understanding a text. “I hate those stupid tests,” he says.

And then there’s calm, sensible, matter-of-fact Mark. He’s from a traditional, white, working-class family. He loves playing rugby, and he hates being in the lowest reading group. “I feel I’m better than the others in that group, but I can’t get good enough to go up to the next one,” he tells me. He accepts his poor reading stoically. “We didn’t do much reading at my last school,” he says. At home, he occasionally reads comics, and, he says, his parents don’t read with him.

He likes funny books, so we read a few by Roald Dahl, Andy Stanton, and Philip Ardagh. His pace is slow and careful, his tone wooden. He plods through joke after joke without cracking a smile, but assures me that he enjoys these stories.

And then, about three months into the program, a breakthrough. Mark picks out a book that’s quite different from anything else he has read with me: Dick King-Smith’s The Water Horse (Yearling, 2000). “Are you sure?” I ask, looking at the dense text, the multisyllabic words, so different from the shorter books we’ve read together.

‘Yes, Miss. I saw the film.’

I’ve seen it, too, and although I loved the old-fashioned magical story of an egg that hatches into a sea monster, it isn’t exactly what I would have expected Mark to pick. But The Water Horse is a big success. He reads more fluently than ever before, courageously tackling enormous long words and serpentine sentences.

“Why do you think you find this book easier to read than the others?” I ask.

“Because I’ve seen the film,” he replies. “I know what’s happening.” It’s as though the burden of using his imagination slows Mark down. A few weeks later, he has another idea for a novel we can read together. “Miss, have you ever heard of a book called Twilight?”

Compared to Freddie and Mark, Alfie—white, working class—is shy and nervous during our first session. His voice is a whisper, and his hands shake as he pulls out his chosen book, a graphic novel about two soccer-crazed brothers. His voice chokes as he tries to read it, and when he comes across a long word, he sounds it out so slowly that he has no clue what it might mean.

We talk about performance anxiety—how reading aloud is much scarier and much more difficult than reading to oneself, even for confident adult readers. And about how—counter to the current political fervor for phonics that reigns in the U.K.—you can’t always identify words by sounding them out. Alfie’s very good at matching letters with their corresponding sounds, but unfortunately that hasn’t helped him learn to read with confidence or enjoyment.

We agree to share the reading between us, and we decide to tackle a conventional novel, Jonny Zucker’s Striker Boy (Frances Lincoln, 2010), which is about a soccer-obsessed 13-year-old. Alfie starts every session slowly, but once he relaxes, the words come faster. His dad is now reading to him at home, he says, and Alfie also reads to his father. “It’s getting easier, Miss,” he says.

After three boys who needed to be cajoled to read, Keira comes as a lovely surprise. She’s outwardly super-confident, a black girl from a working-class West Indian family, who proclaims loudly, “I love reading! I love books!” Although Keira isn’t displeased to read to a stranger once a fortnight, she’s surprised. “I don’t know why the teachers think I need this,” she says of our sessions. I quickly improvise: “They must think you’re clever and with a bit of extra help you could be top of the class.”

Keira’s reading problems seem minor—a blind disregard for punctuation, a little hesitation over unfamiliar words. She admits that before this year she didn’t read much, but then her aunt gave her a copy of Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (HarperCollins, 2001) for her birthday, and she was hooked. Rennison’s romantic comedies are light and extremely funny, but they’re not exactly easy to understand. They feature elaborate jokes based on French and German, languages that are closed books to Keira, and made-up words and references to things that resonate more with my generation than Keira’s. When we read that something is like “Cliff Richard’s Y Fronts,” we giggle as I explain who Cliff Richard is (“a singer… your grandma might like him”) and what Y Fronts are (“You know, those men’s underpants that aren’t boxers”).

Working with Keira is mostly about getting her to expect more from herself. We read Jandy Nelson’s The Sky Is Everywhere (Dial, 2010), and even though its vocabulary is difficult for Keira, the story’s sexual tangle and the characters’ emotional turmoil hold her interest. Then we plunge into Theresa Breslin’s Prisoner of the Inquisition (Doubleday, 2010). Even though Keira has never read historical fiction before—and, indeed, has never heard of the Inquisition—she’s transfixed by the novel’s opening scene, a graphic description of a woman being burned at the stake. When the school year ends, I arrive at our last session with a copy of my latest book for Keira. She literally snatches it from my grasp. “What do you mean?” she says, when I tell her we won’t be meeting again. ”That makes me sad.”

What did I learn from my stint as a volunteer? That reading assessments are arbitrary and strange and don’t pinpoint a child’s strengths and weaknesses. That reading aloud is a particularly difficult skill and children need audiobooks and adults to listen to—and perhaps some sessions with a drama teacher.

I learned that some of the things that authors worry about—is this reference dated? Will children understand it?—don’t matter at all. With the right book at the right time, even the most reluctant reader will persevere.

I also learned that the British government’s utilitarian approach to literacy has succeeded in hindering some children’s reading enjoyment and competence. That English teachers are too busy delivering a demanding national curriculum to show much interest in fiction for young people. That government officials built a new school library without talking to its librarian—who could have told them that they hadn’t allowed enough space for books and learning activities.

As a mother, I learned quite a bit about my daughter’s school. Mostly it confirmed my feeling that the school is a friendly place, where it’s possible to get an excellent education. It’s an inner-city school, though, and trouble does flare up. And when it does, well, the school has its own police officer, based in the library.

One day, I listened as he extricated a furious teenager from a fight, calming him down as he raged against his opponent. “If you make threats to kill, then I will have to arrest you,” explained the officer. “Do you want that to happen?” He soon discovered that the boy was due to give evidence in court that afternoon against someone who had mugged him. “You’re a victim of crime yourself,” the policeman added. “So you know how serious these matters are.” By taking a reasonable approach, he turned an ugly situation around to the point where the student was able to shake the other boy’s hand and return to class.

It could have been a scene right out of one of my novels, which probe London’s gang violence. Watching it, I was transfixed, and I wished I could take notes. There’s so much that one can learn in a library—and not just from the books on the shelves.