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Created: 8:59am on 10-12-2008
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Entry #664806, added on 08-23-09 @ 7:53 am EDT.
[Entry Access Restriction] None.
Title:
Transitional literature
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I'll admit, I have very little experience with today's young adult (henceforward referred to as YA) literature. I use the word quite loosely. Based on the books that my teenage daughter has taken out of the library, and my occasional browsing there, the vast majority of books in this category are pretty bad. My all-time favorite was the one about the girl with the brother who thought he should have been a girl, too. Sure, happens all the time in my neighborhood.
Most YA books have plots about teens falling in love and having sex and getting pregnant or getting their girlfriends pregnant, or taking drugs, or cutting themselves, or having some sort of intense, life-threatening problem. Granted, teens do have these problems, and I'm not trying to say that these books should be censored or forbidden. But do most of them? I don't think so. Not like the situations in these books. Holy hell. They make soap operas seem like kindergarten.
I don't remember what I read when I was a teenager, with the exception of the classic just-say-no tome, Go Ask Alice. When I first read it, I thought, "Wow. Drugs are really bad. I'm not ever taking them." When I got older--like, by college--I read it again and thought, "Wow. What an obvious piece of moralistic, cautionary fiction." It's still entertaining in that light, but I sure wouldn't recommend it to my daughter. She's much more sophisticated than I was, and she'd see through it immediately.
Why do YA books always have to be moralizing about things, anyway? Boring, and fruitless. Maybe that's why most of them are so horrible. The only piece of YA literature I can think of offhand is The Catcher In The Rye. I'm not so sure that's aimed at teens, anyway. But it's excellent.
The following aren't really YA books, but pre-teen. They've stayed in my memory far longer than all the ones aimed at teens, however. Time hasn't dated them, either.
A Wrinkle In Time, Madeline L'Engle. This story succeeds on so many levels: as science fiction, as philosophy, as a tale of families and love. L'Engle's later stories in the series slowly descend into New Age treacle, but this one will stand forever. A classic struggle between Good and Evil, with a main character, Meg, who is far more realistic than your average YA heroine.
The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh. The sequel to the immortal Harriet the Spy, which I suspect inspired every female writer here over a certain age (ahem). This book breaks a lot more boundaries, though, discussing menstruation, divorce, and religious faith fully six years before that overrated "classic" by Blume, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. It does it better, too.
A Bridge To Terabithia, Katherine Patterson. Confession time: I didn't read this until I had a child who had to read it in grade school. Doesn't matter. I would recommend this to every child of eleven or twelve that I know. It deals with friendship and has a nonsexual and nonromantic relationship between a preteen boy and girl, quite beautifully. Something happens midway through that shocked me far more than all the drug-taking and sex in the YA novels. Because I cared about the main characters, it had a great deal of impact. This book will make you cry, but you should read it.
The Gift of Magic, Lois Duncan. Duncan kind of went nuts later on in writing the sort of garbage horror novels for teens that I despise (e.g., I Know What You Did Last Summer), but this book deals with the paranormal in what is almost a believable way. Again, it's because you care about the characters that this story has an impact. Nancy has ESP and precognition, but it's handled tastefully and with a minimum of outsized drama. I liked it that she wanted to keep this gift hidden, and that her brother and sister also had unusual gifts, although more mundane. She, too, is dealing with a family divorce, and her struggles in adapting to her new situation make an interesting and touching story.
I wish more YA books could deal with teen problems without sensationalizing them. If you know of any that you'd recommend as a cut above the average, I'd love to try them. I'd hate to think that teens have so little to choose from in their particular genre. |
© Copyright 2009 Lynn McKenzie (UN: lynnmckenzie at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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