In Defense of Young Adult Literature

It is currently 1:30 in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. I should be in bed, getting a good night's rest. Tomorrow is a busy day, and tomorrow comes especially early on Sundays. And I'm tired - I have that burning feeling behind my eyes of someone who has stayed up later than they ought. But I just can't sleep. I blame the Wall Street Journal.

Earlier tonight I was browsing Twitter, and saw that a link was being passed around by quite a few of the various people I follow. I clicked the link, which, in hindsight, was a mistake. I closed the page after the first two paragraphs, and posted a couple of my initial gut reactions to Twitter. That should've been the end of it. I am usually able to get the need to soap-box out of my system fairly easily. But not this time. What little I read has been bothering me, and now I feel the need to offer a response to the points that article was attempting to make. I know that there will be a million of these types of counter-point posts made, and many will be much better written than mine. But I have the need to say what I'm feeling, so up I go. And this is going to be a long, rambly bit of ranting being written in the middle of the night, so just remember I tried to warn you...

(It might help to read the Wall Street Journal article first.)

My initial reaction to the beginning of this article was at first to ridicule the mother interviewed. She walked into a mega-chain bookstore and found absolutely nothing of any literary merit for her 13 year old daughter. She states that what she found was "all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation". I find this both ridiculous and slightly puzzling. So that woman has read every book offered in the Young Adult Fiction section of her local B&N? She's the Sarah Palin of bookstores! They're not all the "dark, dark stuff" that she claims. But even if a majority of the fiction to be found on the store's shelves did lean toward the maudlin or the dystopian...so what? Some people really enjoy indulging in those ideas through reading. Apparently, there's quite the market for it - someone is buying those bestsellers, after all.

Part of the whole point of literature is this ability to convey emotion, and to make the reader feel deeply, and relate to concepts they may not have ever experienced themselves. Literature challenges us. Or, it should, anyway. It should present to us ideas and feelings and whole worlds that are unfamiliar and possibly even concepts that we might find utterly repulsive. A good book can tell a story. A great book can take us outside of ourselves and turn our whole world upside down with a few words strewn across a page. It's art. And it's also a sort of magic.

As to modern YA being populated by vampires and suicide and self-mutilation...I don't know specifically what books she was referencing (aside from the obvious), so I can't speak to that. But the author of the article, Meghan Cox Gurdon, wants to make a blanket statement condemning all contemporary literature in this genre as being "Darker than when you were a child...", to which she tacks on a patronizing "my dear". I'm here to tell here that she's just dead wrong on that point. I was raised on a healthy diet of a constant stream of diverse literature. Being the child of parents who read fairly voraciously, there were always books in my house growing up. We took regular trips to the library, where I could wander through the stacks as my mom browsed. I'd spend hours running my hands over the tightly packed spines and flipping through worn, musty pages. I flipped through volumes that would have probably raised the author's eyebrows and elicited some disapproval.

The library is where I discovered "The Last Unicorn" and "Watership Down" at around the age of 10. At the age of 12, my dad introduced me to "Lord of the Flies" and "The Hobbit". From there I moved on to classics like "Fahrenheit 451", "Animal Farm", and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by the time I hit high school. All the while, I snuck around secretly reading my mom's paperbacks by Stephen King and Dean Koontz. To this day I push my boundaries as a reader further and further, and I turned out just fine, as far as I can tell.

And I still read YA. In fact, I actively seek it out. I've read the "Mockingjay" trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and the first two books of the "Bohemoth" series by Scott Westerfeld, among many others, and there are a couple of books by Michael Connelly and Neil Gaiman that I recommend to everyone that I can because they are just brilliant literature, regardless of where they are shelved by your favorite bookseller.If I feel industrious, and have the time, I may follow up this post with a list of YA fiction that I'd recommend for young readers. Of course, it begins and ends with "Watership Down", for me, so it may be a short list.

Another point Ms. Gudron attempts to make is that Young Adult fiction is full of nothing but depravity and ugliness, and that what these burgeoning adults read will mold them, and this is what they will become. This may be true - to a point. But is the author really *that* naive in thinking that these same adolescents aren't exposed to depravity and ugliness, profanity and "pathologies", as she calls some behaviors, on an everyday basis? One of the other points of literature, as any lit professor will drill mercilessly into you, is relatability. Writing about teenage pregnancy doesn't instantly compel the reader to run out and get pregnant, but if the topic is covered with honesty and skill, it may make that reader think about it in a way they had not before.

In the case of cutting, Ms. Gudron postulates that reading about it may make some teens more likely to copy the behavior. Sure, if the book in question (in this case, "Scars", which I haven't read myself, because the subject matter doesn't catch my interest) glamorized self-mutilation as being some sort of amazing transcendent spiritual experience, I could see her misguided point. But reading her summary, and online synopsis and reviews doesn't bear that out. She references books by Judy Blume that were at the time seen as "daring", but are written for a specific time and in such a way that many young readers can't relate to the subject matter. I'd go so far as to call them quaint, now. Today's books typically are written for today's teens, warts and all.

In some ways, Ms. Gudron's arguments serve to actually invalidate the entire premise of her article. She obviously doesn't realize it. She writes: "Alas, literary culture is not sympathetic to adults who object either to the words or storylines in young-adult books." No. Nor should it be. What an absolutely absurd concept. Moving on. Oh wait...this would actually seem to be the main point of the article, finally. "In the book trade, this is known as "banning." In the parenting trade, however, we call this "judgment" or "taste." It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks "censorship!"" Because it IS censorship to make a book generally unavailable based on the objections of one or two parents asserting their "judgement" on other people's children. It's really very simple: if you don't want your child reading something, fine, but don't interfere with my child's opportunity to have access to that same material if I find nothing wrong with it. It is up to me to decide if my child is mature enough for the subject matter. And Ms. Gudron goes on to further ruin whatever legitimacy her stance may have once had by making what came off to me as an unnecessarily derisive comment toward Sherman Alexie.

Basically, the whole article was just one long exercise in missing the point. Her examples are too narrow, and make it seem like all YA on the market now is just gore and violence and "immorality". And from reading the comments section, some readers took all of it at face value and ate it right up. But art imitates life, and so as our worlds become more complex, so does our art. Literature is art. It can make you think, it can make you dream, it can make you hurt, it can give you joy or bring you to the depths of sorrow...and it changes as you, the reader, changes. So, just read! And to hell with what some narrow minded people may think. Support the authors and writers who inspire you and continue the fight against this bizarre push toward a common banality.