Kate Muir column in The Times - 'James Bond' for Girls

From 20th October edition of The Times, Kate Muir's column includes information on a couple of series that might appeal to the female teenage contingent:

Earlier this month at the Cheltenham Literature Festival – which my kids love because they get to stay the night in a real hotel with free bubble-bath miniatures – my daughter, my hangover and I were out at ten on a Sunday morning for a lecture on “Spy Girls and Stunt Girls: they show the boys how real sleuthing is done!”

Jonny Zucker, author of the Venus Spring, Stunt Girl action adventures, showed us the cover he wanted for his first book – blue with a girl silhouetted in kickboxing action poses – and what he actually got after tests with readers: a Pepto-Bismol pink cover with a pretty girl’s face and flicky, bouncy hair.

On the espionage side, Carol Hedges invented Jazmin Dawson, a girl spy, in reaction to all the Young Bond and Anthony Horowitz books for boys, and I suppose we can take heart from the fact that only one of the three covers in the series is pink. Aside from the prodigious unisex works of Potter, “Girls read boys’ books, but boys don’t read girls’ books,” shrugged Zucker, who also writes a boys’ adventure series.

Read the whole article about feminism, clothes and the colour pink here.