TADMACK at Finding Wonderland: The Writing YA Weblog brought up the question of whether YA fiction needs to have a happy ending and referred me to Rosemary Graham's blog, Not-So-Terrible After All, where the same question is being discussed.
Evidently this was all inspired by a New York Times Book Review by Polly Shulman that begins "Moralizing may have gone out of fashion in adult fiction a century ago, but it remains a staple of children's literature. The annual awards lists are full of inspiring stories in which a brave and sensitive young person triumphs over modern evils like political oppression, sexism and racism." It ends with "But the tidy resolution, a staple of both the 21st-century serious young adult novel and its Victorian forebears, lacks conviction, as if Glass doesn't quite believe in the redemption her genre requires." (The book being reviewed is The Year the Gypsies Came by Linzi Glass.)
TADMACK and one of Rosemary's commenters talked about having studied writing for YA and learning that such writing should offer at least a little hope. This is where my lack of education in my field reaches up and bites me in the backside. Because when I read Shulman's review, I couldn't apply it to anything I'd learned about providing redemption and hope for the young. All I could do was think, "How condescending."
When I think of "inspiring stories in which a brave and sensitive young person triumphs over modern evils like political oppression, sexism and racism," I don't think YA. I think Oprah! YA doesn't require redemption. Women's victim stories do.
Yes, the annual awards lists may be full of these kinds of titles. But, personally, I think it's because the adults who select the titles like to read them. It doesn't have anything to do with the requirements of the genre itself.
But maybe if I knew more about what I'm doing, I wouldn't find reading these kinds of things so annoying. A little more education could provide a calming influence.
2 comments:
you wrote:
When I think of "inspiring stories in which a brave and sensitive young person triumphs over modern evils like political oppression, sexism and racism," I don't think YA. I think Oprah! YA doesn't require redemption. Women's victim stories do.
i agree, and i think this need to provide inpsiration may come from a need to either "correct" the amoral ambiguities present in literature or society (or both), and this growing sense that we can no longer expect young adults to find these lessons anywhere else.
but i look back to my adolescence during the 70's and realize that the books i was attracted to weren't on the young adult racks at the library, they were the adult books. once they start pushing steinbeck and hemingway on you in seventh grade, and you feel that push to "get serious" with literature, why would you want to go back to teenage characters who didn't illuminate the fascinating adult world?
i wanted clues to the absurdity of adult life. i went looking for it in vonnegut and heller and bradbury and (by senior year) chas. bukowski. okay, maybe i was an odd kid, but i think the same holds true even today. when i worked in a bookstore the teens were buying (or reading in the store) toni morrison, laurel hamilton, zane, pynchon, salinger (still, though not 'catcher in the rye') and anything on the dispaly tables that literally looked good. teens did NOT shop the teen/YA section of the store: their PARENTS did.
libraries probably do the most in terms of getting YA books into YA hands, second only to movies based on YA books. ned vinzini plays well with the teen crowd, but i only ever saw adults buying and reading his book.
there may be a much larger story here about writers and audience, crossed signals and miscommunication. when a friend heard i was working on a YA novel they seemed amused by the idea, admitting that they hadn't really thought about the fact that it was mainly adults writing for kids. "i guess it's the nostalgia factor for you, right?" was how they rationalized what i was doing. i laughed, then i was annoyed, then i started to wonder: what's the ratio between adult and teen readers of YA fiction?
i continue to wonder...
Ten years ago when I first started publishing, I was told that teens didn't read YA. Now YA is a huge market. But that doesn't answer the question of who is reading it.
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