"How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18."When I was a teenager, there wasn't any literature aimed directly at children from the ages of 12 to 18, so I read adult stuff. And it was plenty dark. What's changed is not teens or their interests. It's that a market in true "young adult" fiction has emerged in recent years, whereas in the past what was called YA was aimed at 11-year-olds, not teenagers.
However, the argument is often (in this thread, even) advanced in a way that suggests the things you read, the fantasies you engage in, have no effect on how you develop into an adult.Ok, but that's a bit of a false dichotomy. It's not like there are only two possible arguments: it doesn't matter what kids read, or children must read wholesome, joyful books or they will be turned from wholesome, joyful children into miserable self-mutilators. Teenagers are perfectly capable of discovering darkness without the help of YA literature. I think you could argue that YA literature helps them understand and deal with the darkness that we all must confront.
Can anyone else in their mid-thirties tell me if that experience is odd? Were there YA books in the late 80's/early 90's and I just missed them? If they did exist what were they like?There was something called "YA," but it was really aimed at kids in junior high. There wasn't a whole lot of literature aimed at and read by teenagers. This was enough of a problem that when I worked at a bookstore in the mid-90s, we maintained a shelf of books for high school students, comprised mostly of adult books with young protagonists.
Cynthia Voigt, who wrote fairly dark realist fiction. Her most famous are the Tillerman cycle, which starts with a novel called Homecoming, about a 12-year-old girl whose mother abandons her and her three siblings in a mall parking lot.That's interesting. I loved Homecoming and Dicey's Song passionately, but I think of them more as old-style YA, aimed at pre-teens. Maybe it's just that I was a pre-teen when I read them.
By f—ing gatekeepers (the letter-writing editor spelled it out), she meant those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read. 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!"What does it mean for a "gatekeeper to object to a book"? In the case of parents, it means that kids don't get to read them. In the case of librarians or teachers, it means that kids aren't even exposed to them. She's coy about what the impact of these "objections" might mean, but in a very concrete sense it usually constitutes denying teens access to the books in question, or asking that they're not written (or published) in the first place.
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And seriously. She's complaining about books for 13 year olds, and is actively screening/censoring what her daughter reads at that age? Good luck with that.
Although 13 is still a far cry from adulthood, it's not a completely immature age. Censorship is not going to be a remotely effective tactic for very much longer, and will almost certainly be more damaging than the alternative.
Teenagers have always been dark and brooding. That's sort of just how the horomone/puberty thing works. Drowning teens in literature that suggests that they should not be dark and brooding is outright abusive.
Oh, and the subtle nod that books will make your kids gay? Classy.
Go back to the 1950s, Ms Gurdon. You evidently do not like 2011, and we don't very much like you either.
posted by schmod at 8:00 AM on June 13, 2011 [15 favorites]