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Young Adult books
Aug. 25th, 2005 07:21 amI never read young adult books much as a kid. Pretty much I liked fantasy, and there wasn't a "young adult fantasy" market per se when I was first reading. I read children's fantasy like The Wizard of Oz series and adult fantasy like The Lord of the Rings.
Occasionally I'd read books just because they were there: I've read both Bambi and Bambi's Children by Felix Randall, I've read the whole of Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, I've read Bobbsey Twins mysteries and Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, etc. The old classics that were still floating around Vermont libraries in large numbers in 1985-1989.
Now I read a lot of young adult fantasy because adult fantasy, with some sterling exceptions, strikes me as being too beefy - like some adolescent quarterback on steroids, all concerned with smiting some evil with the finesse of a flying tackle (ok, flying tackles probably have their own finesse, but sometimes I want more like the finesse of hemming a skirt, y'know). Epic sagas in 10 vols. and 40,000 pages with war raging across the ravaged lands of Ry-kiem-athel or whatever make me SNORE.
However, sometimes young adult books put me in a towering rage. Why? Because the adolescent characters are sooooooo....... sanitized.
I loved and adored Alanna: The First Adventure and its sequels. At least part of the reason was that, along with smiting some bad guys, Alanna wrestled with her developing sexual awareness as a teen, and had a lot of personal self-doubt.
Books like "The City of Ember" that I read yesterday seem to just subtract all of that interior life of adolescents in the service of the story. An entire novel starring a pair of twelve year olds where neither main character ever misbehaves or thinks vicious thoughts about adults? For me, this strains credibility.
The worst example I've ever experienced of this was "Chasing Vermeer" by Blue Balliet. She's a local author, and the book got a lot of publicity nationwide. I read it, and couldn't help comparing it to a popular school-reading book of my childhood - "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler". Both books involve puzzles children must solve and missing artworks. The difference? In "Chasing Vermeer", the two students live at home, respect their parents, feel vast guilt about even minor infractions of school rules (Oh no! we've borrowed a key to search the school basement for art! We're bad!). In "Mixed-Up Files" the two kids have run away from home and are living in the Metropolitan Art Museum, hiding in the bathrooms at checkout time from the guards and washing their clothes with money they fish out of the fountain out front.
People talk about modern youth as if they were a) under constant threat from predators and b) vicious and violent, with bullying and school shootings. I don't think hard data support either. The hard data on kidnappings and child sexual assaults say these things are less frequent now than in the 70s, we just hear about them more. Given the stories of fights, tricks, and so forth I've heard from my grandparents and other adults over 50, I'm pretty sure kids are less cruel and less violent now than in the past. The difference: they're being watched EVERY MINUTE and so adults are constantly aware of what they due. I was shocked when I read stories in Zenna Henderson's excellent "Holding Wonder" because the narrators speak approvingly of little kids solving their problems with a little scuffle and maybe a black eye, after which they get along fine. The same situation today might invite a teacher conference or a lawsuit.
The result and my complaint?: the characters in most of the young adult books I read seem blander than the children in children's books written decades ago. Few modern young adult characters have the gumption of Li'l Orphan Annie or the self-reliance of Dorothy and her compatriots (who were often self-sufficient at 13 or so). Sex is either the main thread of the book (a la all those books that are shocking the media right now) or suspiciously absent, as if kids were either doing it all the time or utterly chaste in mind and body. All of it is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Ok, it's PMS time and that's why I'm so worked up over it, I know. I'll eat some chocolate and shut up, but I wish more books out there gave their adolescent characters a bit of space to be human and solve problems in realistic ways
(props to Chris Crutcher, Rob Thomas, Tamora Pierce, Stephen Chbosky, who I think do this really well.)
Occasionally I'd read books just because they were there: I've read both Bambi and Bambi's Children by Felix Randall, I've read the whole of Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, I've read Bobbsey Twins mysteries and Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, etc. The old classics that were still floating around Vermont libraries in large numbers in 1985-1989.
Now I read a lot of young adult fantasy because adult fantasy, with some sterling exceptions, strikes me as being too beefy - like some adolescent quarterback on steroids, all concerned with smiting some evil with the finesse of a flying tackle (ok, flying tackles probably have their own finesse, but sometimes I want more like the finesse of hemming a skirt, y'know). Epic sagas in 10 vols. and 40,000 pages with war raging across the ravaged lands of Ry-kiem-athel or whatever make me SNORE.
However, sometimes young adult books put me in a towering rage. Why? Because the adolescent characters are sooooooo....... sanitized.
I loved and adored Alanna: The First Adventure and its sequels. At least part of the reason was that, along with smiting some bad guys, Alanna wrestled with her developing sexual awareness as a teen, and had a lot of personal self-doubt.
Books like "The City of Ember" that I read yesterday seem to just subtract all of that interior life of adolescents in the service of the story. An entire novel starring a pair of twelve year olds where neither main character ever misbehaves or thinks vicious thoughts about adults? For me, this strains credibility.
The worst example I've ever experienced of this was "Chasing Vermeer" by Blue Balliet. She's a local author, and the book got a lot of publicity nationwide. I read it, and couldn't help comparing it to a popular school-reading book of my childhood - "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler". Both books involve puzzles children must solve and missing artworks. The difference? In "Chasing Vermeer", the two students live at home, respect their parents, feel vast guilt about even minor infractions of school rules (Oh no! we've borrowed a key to search the school basement for art! We're bad!). In "Mixed-Up Files" the two kids have run away from home and are living in the Metropolitan Art Museum, hiding in the bathrooms at checkout time from the guards and washing their clothes with money they fish out of the fountain out front.
People talk about modern youth as if they were a) under constant threat from predators and b) vicious and violent, with bullying and school shootings. I don't think hard data support either. The hard data on kidnappings and child sexual assaults say these things are less frequent now than in the 70s, we just hear about them more. Given the stories of fights, tricks, and so forth I've heard from my grandparents and other adults over 50, I'm pretty sure kids are less cruel and less violent now than in the past. The difference: they're being watched EVERY MINUTE and so adults are constantly aware of what they due. I was shocked when I read stories in Zenna Henderson's excellent "Holding Wonder" because the narrators speak approvingly of little kids solving their problems with a little scuffle and maybe a black eye, after which they get along fine. The same situation today might invite a teacher conference or a lawsuit.
The result and my complaint?: the characters in most of the young adult books I read seem blander than the children in children's books written decades ago. Few modern young adult characters have the gumption of Li'l Orphan Annie or the self-reliance of Dorothy and her compatriots (who were often self-sufficient at 13 or so). Sex is either the main thread of the book (a la all those books that are shocking the media right now) or suspiciously absent, as if kids were either doing it all the time or utterly chaste in mind and body. All of it is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Ok, it's PMS time and that's why I'm so worked up over it, I know. I'll eat some chocolate and shut up, but I wish more books out there gave their adolescent characters a bit of space to be human and solve problems in realistic ways
(props to Chris Crutcher, Rob Thomas, Tamora Pierce, Stephen Chbosky, who I think do this really well.)
