The Perplexities of YA Lit

"There are books I liked at the age of sixteen. I still like them." - Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead

Critics and historians have claimed that the Victorian "invented" childhood. At the very least, they started to look at children as something other than miniature adults - as a distinct group with its own interests and needs (and commodities). They started asking hard questions about child labor and chipping away at what had once been taken for granted: tiny, nimble fingers working in factories or tiny bodies crawling through mines. According to some quick internet research, teenagers don't rise up as a separate category until the 1920s... and it seems to me that the literary market just discovered them all over again!

As someone who teaches literature, I'm a great fan of books that get young people excited about reading, but as a reader, the YA movement confuses me. Does the "young adult" label apply to the characters within the work? To the intended reading audience? Both? Because YA lit is exploding - the sections in my local library and local bookstore are enormous - but sedate, adult fiction doesn't seem to be doing the same. Does my age automatically exclude me from reading YA lit? Do I look like some kind of creeper if I browse those shelves? I don't actually know the answers... but I know that I do love some of the books I encountered at a much younger age -- so maybe it's okay to browse the books of younger readers? Okay or not, these are recent reads I completed in that perplexing category!

 I read Thirteen Reasons because my students kept talking about it and I wanted to be somewhat in the loop... and I wanted to watch the newly minted Netflix series (though I quickly abandoned it despite the wonderful acting of its narrator). I don't know quite what to say about this one. There were interesting moments of poetry and I did want to get to the bottom of the mystery... but I was quick to place it on the donation table, too. Perhaps knowing the fate of the central character going in (that's not a spoiler, by the way - you learn about it in the first few pages) took something away, because there's no restoring that life... although maybe there's a little bit of redemption in there somewhere.

I was super excited for the publication of A &B because I am a huge fan of Lillis's How to Repair a Mechanical Heart. If you are at all a fan of Star Trek, fan fiction, or general geeky fandom (and can survive a few NSFW scenes) then add Mechanical Heart to your world. It's one of the few books I can repeatedly read and laugh out loud to! A &B continued Lillis's tradition of insanely beautiful (and often unusual) metaphors. The example I remember off of the top of my head is the cat's eyes were the color of peeled grapes -- isn't that terribly strange and vivid? As for content, there were some wonderful spoofs of reality television and both characters were sympathetic despite their rivalry. I didn't love it as much as its predecessor, but I think it tackled important content -- and it was still laugh-out-loud funny!

In the end, these two books are pretty much diametrically opposed to one another... but they both fall under that YA umbrella.  I still don't have a complete answer for exactly what YA lit is, who it is for, and why it has exploded so thoroughly onto the market... but I'm eager to read more offerings if I can figure those questions out!