YA Hatin'

I recently stumbled upon Patrick Ness's brilliant YA sci-fi (cyberpunk? )novel, "The Knife of Never Letting Go," (thanks to New Yorker article on dystopian YA fiction). It's the first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy. Sadly, I just finished book 2, and found out the 3rd isn't due out until fall (September 28, 2010, to be exact). There really is an actual physical sadness I'm experiencing, knowing I can't get back into Todd and Viola's world any time soon (unless I go back and re-read book 1, which I might just very well do).



Because I've been so enamored with the books, I've been curious to see what other reviewers are saying. And that's how I found this bit of YA hatin', from Frank Boyce for The Guardian:

If I have one quibble, it is that I think it should be sitting proudly on the shelf next to these books [Huck Finn, The Handmaid's Tale], rather than being hidden away in the "young adult" ghetto. There's been a lot of fury among authors recently about the proposal to "age-band" children's books, but in a way they're too late. The real disaster has already happened. It's called "young adult" fiction. It used to be the case that you moved on from children's fiction to adult fiction, from The Owl Service, maybe, to Catcher in the Rye. There were, of course, some adult authors who were more fashionable with teenage readers than others - Salinger, Vonnegut, Maya Angelou. But these were chosen by teenagers themselves from the vast world of books. Some time ago, someone saw that trend and turned it into a demographic. Fortunes were made but something crucial was lost. We have already ghettoised teenagers' tastes in music, in clothes and - God forgive us - in food. Can't we at least let them share our reading? Is there anything more depressing than the sight of a "young adult" bookshelf in the corner of the shop. It's the literary equivalent of the "kids' menu" - something that says "please don't bother the grown-ups". If To Kill a Mockingbird were published today, that's where it would be placed, among the chicken nuggets.

What?!? No he din't!

Yes he did. I think one of his points is that once a book gets tagged as YA, then only YAs will read it, and he really thinks "Knife" is such a great book, everyone--teens and adults alike--should read it. It's that good.

Because he agrees with me about the book, I can almost forgive him his nasty rant against YA lit. Almost.

He doesn't get that those of us who have been advocating for YA lit for a long time have been fighting just as long for that "young adult bookshelf" in the corner of the bookstore. We have wanted the separate bookshelf to highlight the amazing literature written just for teens, not adults--literature that does not just simply, as Boyce contends, "[reflect] the superficial concerns of that demographic." (What is superficial about racism? questions about identity? questions about war, revolution, good guys and bad guys? Is hope useful? Redemption possible? These are concerns that Ness takes up in "Knife," where two teen protagonists must figure this stuff out with little help from adults. In fact, true to YA form, it's the adults in the book who screw everything up in the first place).

I think books like Ness's make the point that YA lit isn't about dis-respecting teens, or telling them to "please don't bother the grown ups." Instead, I think it's very respectful of the adolescent, and the adolescent reader--people who, no longer kids and not yet adults, spend a lot of time thinking about out who they are, what the world is like, and what their place in the world will be. More importantly, these young people have the energy and ability to change the world--especially when, like Todd and Viola--they learn it's full of liars and NOISE.