Hey, YA lit people

[3rdragon]

Have you read this article in today's Wall Street Journal about dark themes in YA fiction?

I'm really not sure what to think of it. I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of the unrelenting grimness in a lot of today's teen literature, and I never got into problem novels, even though I was a teenager at the time when they were flourishing. At the same time, these issues are there, and high schoolers have to deal with them, and to try to create a world where they don't exist seems to me as much an act of deliberate fantasy as any genre work. Which isn't to say that I don't love a good romp with Edward Eager or Elizabeth Enright. But Swallows and Amazons doesn't look any more like my life than Harry Potter does. And I would quickly lose patience with wholesome coming-of-age stories if they were the only fare available. Maybe the article isn't arguing that wholesome coming-of-age stories should be the only fare available. Maybe it's just bewailing the lack of them. But if that's the case, they aren't looking in the right places. The Penderwicks is about as wholesome as they come, even if the mother is dead. And George R. R. Martin or no George R. R. Martin, there's a great deal of tame, wholesome fantasy and science fiction available right now (one that comes to mind is Hilari Bell's Knight and Rogue, and another is Wrede's Frontier Magic).

I think my real issue with this is the whole "it's not censorship, it's responsible parenting" stance. On the one hand, I can understand the I don't want my kid reading that! impulse. Also the complaint that vivid depictions of cutting could be a trigger. But at the same time, that's still censorship.

I also find it really interesting that one of their recommended books is Fahrenheit 451. I find it less interesting that they've divided their "Books we can recommend for young adult readers" section into Books for Young Men (Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi; Peace, Richard Bausch; Old School, Tobias Wolff; Farenheit 451, Bradbury; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Hadon; True Grit, Charles Portis) and Books for Young Women (What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell; Ophelia, Lisa Kline; Angelmonster, Veronica Bennett; Z for Sachariah, Robert C. O'Brien; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith). Can't books just be Books for Young People? Or Books for People? And while I haven't read a lot of the books I just listed, the descriptions use a lot of words like "gritty" and "violent." And my memory of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, admittedly from a great many years ago, is that it was pretty heavy stuff.

Maybe part of my problem is that there are books available in just about whatever you're looking for these days. If you don't like the mainstream bestsellers, buy the stuff you do approve of and try to push publishers that way. And I still maintain that the best way for parents to deal with kids reading problematic books is to talk to the kids about what they're reading.



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Also?
It occurred to me this week that I'm going to Zambia in a little over two months. Starting to freak out a little about that.

Comments

[relique.livejournal.com]

When I was trying to discuss Hunger Games, at one point I was comparing it to Z for Zachariah. The only way one can suggest it's less grim than Hunger Games is because there are only three live characters, and one is a dog, so there are that many fewer people to die.

[3rdragon]

A lot of their recommended books sounded pretty grim, even if they didn't look like they would include graphic descriptions of cutting. I almost have to wonder if the woman who wrote the article also wrote the book recommendations, but there aren't credits to anyone else, so . . .