Y.A. Lit in the news
There's a piece on young adult literature in this morning's Globe and Mail. Commentator Sheila Heti makes a couple of good points. The first is that adult approval is the kiss of death for a young adult novel. (This makes things tricky for the marketing folk at publishers!). The second is that young adults read all over the map. That was sure true for me in my high school years. I read children's books (in secret), lighter adult fare (Mary Stewart, Paul Gallico, Sherlock Holmes), books to try to fit in (Siddhartha, Beautiful Losers) and oddities (the minor novels of Thomas Hardy, the Vancouver Public Library had a matched set and I was the only one who ever borrowed them). What Heti omits from her argument, however, is any mention of young adult literary fiction. What about Ursula K. LeGuin's Gifts, Tim Wynne-Jones's Blink and Caution, M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing? These are books of intellectual and emotional heft, satisfying to adults but focussed on adolescent characters and concerns. Sure, any young adult reader worth her salt is going to be reading adult books, but she doesn't need to choose between The Hunger Games at one end of the scale and Dostoevsky at the other. There is plenty on young adult lists to challenge and sustain. Just don't tell her I said so.
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Either you’ve entirely missed the point of Ms. Heti’s ‘argument’ or you’ve decided, for some strange reason, that a distortion of it better merits your own readers’ attention. Ms. Heti’s concern isn’t to minimize the worth of Y.A. literature but to show how her own resistance to graduating from it was grounded in a mistaken apprehension. Far from being a stultifying distillation of tried-and-true, conservative values, as she’d feared, the world’s great literature contains exactly the sort of self-examination and questioning exploration of life and how to live it that characteristically preoccupies young adults. It is for this reason that she feels ‘adult literature’ is, in an important sense, mismarketed, since it delivers to young readers the marketing promise of Y.A. books more reliably than most Y.A. books do themselves, paradoxical as this sounds.