Tag Archives: YA

From the Dawn of YA to the Present, By One Who’s Been There

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There have always been books about teens—Jane Eyre, for example, with its eighteen-year-old heroine. Wuthering Heights—it’s just like Twilight, minus the vampires! But as a marketing category, YA (Young Adult) has only existed since the late 1960s. Prior to that, books that were about teens and very popular with teens were not actually marketed to teens. Catcher in The Rye, Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore, Lord of the Flies, and A Separate Peace were all literary fiction for adults. On the other side, the Nancy Drew books, the Hardy Boyhe s books, and Helen Dore Boylston’s Carol and Sue Barton books were all technically children’s books. Some series, like Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series or the Little House on the Prairie books, followed a character from childhood through the teen years to adulthood and (of course!) marriage. Books that today we would think of as YA, like Beverly Cleary’s Jean and Johnny or The Middle Sister by Lois Duncan, would have been shelved in the children’s section when they were published in 1959.

In 1967 one book changed everything—The Outsiders, a novel about sensitive, misunderstood Oklahoma gang members. Written when its author Susie Hinton was only sixteen, The Outsiders literally has everything a good book could have. This novel was so successful it launched YA as a new marketing category. S.E. Hinton wrote three more killer novels and then—either because she burnt out, was intimidated by her own fame, or simply wanted to do something else like any normal person does—took a long hiatus. Nine years later she came out with a YA novel called Taming The Star Runner which was pretty great but lacked the incandescent power of her earlier novels, and went on to write two picture books, a novel for grown-ups, and a short story collection. The Outsiders has stood the test of time, selling 14 million copies so far, and I imagine it will stay in print until civilization collapses completely. Starting in 1967, there was an explosion of great YA books that you will still find in the library (such as Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender and Paul Zindel’s The Pigman.) Some novels originally conceived for adults, such as Robert Cormier’s incredibly disturbing, violent, awesome, but sometimes misogynist novels, were redirected to a YA audience.

I was lucky enough to grow up during what many call “The Golden Age” of YA, the 1970s and 1980s. (And, to be fair, the late 1960s, before I was born.) The titles alone were amazing. (They’ll Never Make A Movie Starring Me! A Hero Ain’t Nothing But A Sandwich. The Fog Comes On Little Pig Feet. I’m Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down. My Darling, My Hamburger. Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Why Did She Have To Die? And I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip.)The cover art was fabulous. Of course there are great covers today, but no matter how nicely you art design your stock photo, it still looks like a stock photo.

And what was inside these inventively-titled, beautifully-packaged books? Mind blowing stories! “Problem novels” reigned supreme, with the result that sheltered shut-ins like myself got to read about all sorts of lurid topics. Go Ask Alice was the real diary of an anonymous teen drug addict who died of an overdose—except of course it turned out to be fiction. (I did always marvel at how the girl managed to keep such a meticulous diary when she was traveling all over the country stoned out of her mind.) Want to read about a girl becoming an exploited sex worker? Try Steffie Can’t Come Out To Play by Fran Arrick. It was not uncommon for the main character to die at the end, especially if the book was about running away from home. See Dave Run by Jeanette Eyerly (who was writing YA before it was called YA) and Runaway’s Diary by Marilyn Harris were two in particular that broke my young heart.

In 2011 the Wall Street Journal, a periodical that’s always looking out for the best interests of young people, ran a very controversial piece suggesting that contemporary YA was too dark and teens should be offered more upbeat fare. People replied with sensitive, well-reasoned arguments and many teen bloggers offered heartfelt responses about how much YA fiction had helped them when they were struggling with things like suicidal feelings, self-harm, bullying, and eating disorders. But my reaction was, “Where were you in the 1970s, O literary guardians of the wellbeing of the young?”

Although many of these novels were extremely heavy-hitting, they also had more leeway than today’s YA to be “literary” or take their time winding up to the conflict. A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Patton Walsh, a historical novel about the Plague ravaging a 17th Century English town, spends Lord knows how many dozens of pages talking about sheep and rural life before anyone so much as coughs. It makes it so much more disturbing when you finally reach what the book is “about.” Silver by Norma Fox Mazer (rebranded as Sarabeth #1 so it can be part of a series like all the cool books) is very typical of its time in its hyper-realistic, picaresque style. It’s all about a working-class girl who lives in a trailer park with her fun young mom and then transfers to a different school where she makes new friends. About two thirds of the way through the book, the “issue” is introduced. That would never fly today. Today aspiring YA writers are trained to “grab the reader by the throat” in the opening sentences. This is not because experts discovered that young people like to get straight to the point. It’s because in today’s competitive market, agents don’t have time to read more than a page of your novel before deciding that it’s not what they’re looking for.

The line between YA and middle grade (for 8-12 year olds) was blurrier back then too. Silver isn’t really a YA novel by today’s standards, with its twelve-year-old protagonist. Another wonderful classic YA/MG novel with this old-fashioned feel is The Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, a contemplative, character-driven novel about a girl whose intellectually disabled brother goes missing. Today only a successful veteran writer like Lois Lowry (The Giver) can still afford to use the slower-paced style from the 1970s that gently wraps you up into a fictional world, and even then typically in middle grade books rather than YA.

But I’m not sorry that the “Golden Age” is over, as much as I loved it. (Pretty much every time anyone starts to get nostalgic for a time gone by, I need to pause and reflect whether me and my friends would have been able to get birth control or kiss the person we liked, just for a couple examples, in those bygone days.) Contemporary YA books have a lot to offer that classic books don’t—like more characters who aren’t white, or LGBTQ characters who make it through the whole book without being raped, beaten up, humiliated, or dying.

Promoting diversity is the battle in YA today. There are little milestones all the time. 2004, the first YA novel featuring a teen who is transgender (Luna by Julie Anne Peters.) 2009, a Latino author (Francisco X. Stork) makes the New York Times list of annual notable children’s books, with his awesome YA novel Marcelo in the Real World, which features a Latino teen on the autism spectrum. 2010, the first YA novel to make the (children’s) bestseller list with a gay main character (Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.) 2014, the first YA book showing two boys kissing on the cover (Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan.)

Sure, it’s fun to read a YA novel about an Olympic athlete that has a coded subtext of same-gender love (Zan Hagen’s Marathon by R.R. Knudson, 1984,) but now you can read a YA novel about an Olympic athlete where the straight-up text is same-gender love (The Next Competitor by K.P. Kincaid.) Why read a YA novel about boarding school life where the idea of being a lesbian makes students vomit and cry with shame (The Last of Eden by Stephanie S. Tolan, 1981), when you can read Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg or Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series for some queer boarding school fun?

YA publishing today is not a shiny Plato’s Republic of respect for diversity. YA novels with LGBTQ main characters or themes represent less than 1% of all YA novels. YA and middle grade books starring people of color make up about 5% of all YA/MG titles. At least on the LGBTQ side, this represents a huge increase over years past. The fact that it’s getting better at all is for the usual reasons, activism and the dedicated hard work of some people in the industry. Every time some damn fool thing happens, readers and professionals rally and push back. Usually without having to put down their phones, because all the dialogue seems to take place on Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

When viewers of the Hunger Games movie began tweeting that it was “awkward” or upsetting or made them lose interest to see the character Rue portrayed by an African-American actor, there was an outpouring of support for diversity in YA novels. (Writer Suzanne Collins clearly described Rue in the novel as having satiny brown skin, but many readers were unable to take that in. What I took away from all this in terms of writing is that it’s a waste of time describing what your characters look like since no one pays any attention to it anyway.) In 2011 when writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown came forward with the story that an agent considering their manuscript had asked them to de-gay some of the characters, the outcome was a campaign called #yesgayya which brought the issue of LGBTQ themes in YA into public discussion amongst the Twitter set.

There’s also a continual outcry against whitewashing, the practice of putting a white face on the cover of a book about a person of color. (What you more frequently see, but it’s harder to say it’s not simply for artistic reasons, is a book about a person of color that has a silhouette or any image that is not a person.) The most publicized example of this was Justine Larbalestier’s Liar in 2009. The original American book cover featured a white teen while in the narrative the teen is African-American. The uproar was so huge that Bloomsbury apologized and changed the cover to a similar image featuring an African-American girl. The probable reason they did such a dumb thing in the first place, against the wishes of the author, was they believed they would sell more copies with a white face on the cover.

The bigger problem is that some people in publishing not only think a cover featuring a person of color won’t sell, they think a book featuring a person of color won’t sell either. And this is also an industry where agents and then editors have to feel mad, overwhelming passion for a book in order to take it on. If there’s anything about a manuscript that makes an editor feel uncomfortable, or makes them feel that they can’t relate to a character, that is a reason to pass.

Lucky me, as a writer I no longer have to worry about any of this. I write for a small press that specializes in LGBTQ books, Bold Strokes Books. 30% of all the not-very-many LGBTQ YA titles published each year are published by small presses like this, as well as some publishers who are not part of “the Big Six” but are still quite big from my worm’s eye view, like Disney Hyperion. My only concern would be if I ever wanted to write a YA novel about cisgender heterosexual teens, because then how would I ever get it published? But not all writers are as lucky as I am. Some of us are still toiling away in the foothills of mainstream publishing, hoping that one of those godlike creatures will smile down.

Earlier this month there was a very popular Tumblr campaign called #weneeddiversebooks, in which people posted photos and statements about why everyone benefits from kid lit about people from diverse backgrounds. This happened partially as a response to the announcement of an all-white, all-male panel of “luminaries of children’s literature” at Bookcon (which is a big deal NYC publishing event.) There were many moving and funny statements. My favorites: 1) Two guys holding signs that said, “I’m not him, but I’d like to get to know him better.” 2) ‘#WeNeedDiversesBooks because “my sister has Down Syndrome” followed by “my sister has a black belt” shouldn’t catch everyone so off guard. Books show casing people with disabilities excelling or kicking butt would educate the general public, and show others with disabilities that being the star, saving the day, or being the heroine is something they can also strive towards.’ 3) “#weneeddiversebooks because if I’d ever seen myself in fiction, I might’ve understood myself better and not have been driven to suicidal-depression and self-harm as a teenager.” 4) A tall boy with a basketball holding a sign saying “Because I like pink too!” 5) “#WeNeedDiverseBooks because i’m black, queer, fat, and a bunch of other marginalized and oppressed identities. And I want to be the hero and ride a fucking dragon in books too.”

The natural corollary of campaigns like this is encouraging people to support diverse YA by buying it. If the industry think diverse books don’t sell well, prove them wrong. If you say you want to read books about a more diverse swathe of characters, prove it. If you don’t have money to be buying all these new books, put them on hold at the library—trust me, those librarians are keeping track of what books are popular.

It’s still true that most readers of YA (Young Adult) books are teens. But just barely. Almost half of YA readers are over eighteen, with the 30-44 year olds accounting for 28% of sales. If you picked up The Fault in Our Stars or the Harry Potter books, you were reading YA too. There’s a new genre developing called “New Adult” that aims to appeal to this older segment of the readership by combining the magic of YA with more adult things, like explicit sex. New Adult books mostly feature college-aged protagonists because otherwise, ick!

What is the enduring charm of YA? I think it’s simple. YA delivers more reliably than literary fiction, which can be so awful. YA needs a strong storyline to keep teens’ attention otherwise they will put the book down. And it must have heart and authenticity, because young people are exquisitely calibrated bullshit detectors. If you haven’t read any YA since you were a youngster, think carefully before you try it. You might be hooked for life.

 

 

The Romance of Dystopia

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The Hunger Games and Divergent may have romance elements but they’re not romance novels. Katniss and Tris don’t, for the most part, have time to focus on boyfriends; they’re too busy trying to stay alive and fighting their oppressors. Romance is about love; the most popular YA dystopias are about freedom. That’s a fundamental difference.

Or is it? When you actually read romance novels, it’s not so clear. Especially in historical romances, the parallels with YA dystopias can be startling. For example, Laura Kinsale’s 1993 classic For My Lady’s Heart is set in Medieval Europe — a setting as alien, and in many ways as authoritarian, as Tris’ future Chicago or Katniss’s District. The Princess Melanthe, like her peers in YA, is hemmed in by rules and proscriptions, her every move monitored and enmeshed in plot and counterplot. Born in England, Melanthe married into an Italian house, and her husband’s death set off a cascade of political intrigue as various suitors vie for her lands and power. One of her husbands’ Italian rivals has forced her to travel with his son, a castrated assassin who sleeps in her bed to make sure she doesn’t betray his father even in her sleep. Her entire life is devoted to concealing her real feelings under an icy veneer of calculation. Her husband “had trained her to trust no one and nothing, to lie of everything to everyone.” That’s how you live under totalitarianism. Katniss pretending to love Peta;  Tris concealing that she’s divergent; Melanthe pretending to marry a man when she has no intention of doing so — they’ve all learned to dissemble in the face of power.

Rose Lerner’s recently published Regency romance Sweet Disorder is less grim — no one is threatened with death — but there are still parallels. Phoebe Sparks is a poor widow whose sister has become pregnant out of wedlock, and faces exile and shame As a woman without much money, Phoebe’s options are constrained by rules which are both arbitrary and cruel. There’s a local election, and both sides are willing to provide her with much needed cash since her vote is needed — except that it’s not her vote, but her husband’s. should she remarry. Because of the elaborate mores of a strange society, she has to sacrifice herself to save her sister…which is exactly the dilemma which faces Katniss in the Hunger Games.

All of these books, then, are devoted to dystopias, past or present — they all involve women trying to live their lives in the shadow of repressive power. Or, to look at it another way, they all concern women trying to negotiate between patriarchy and love.

It’s true that the exact nature of that negotitation is somewhat different in Hunger Games and Divergent than it is in For My Lady’s Heart and A Sweet Disorder. Most obviously, the YA novels involve significantly more guns. Katniss and Tris protect their loved ones, or try to, through violent political action; the response to exploitive power structures (which, significantly, aren’t always run by men in either book) is revolution. Romance novels, on the other hand, tend to look for non-violent, personal solutions to political problems. Pam Rosenthal’s Regency The Slightest Provocation, for example, concludes with the protagonists, an estranged husband and wife, reconciling and declaring their love as they work together to prevent agent provacateurs from goading laborers into a demonstration that the government can bloodily quash. Injustice is undermined by peace and love, both personal and political. YA responds to patriarchal dystopia with violent political resistance; Romance with nonviolence abetted by personal affection .

Again, though, the binary is less clear than it appears. The Hunger Games, for instance, is acutely aware of the limitations of violence as a response to violence. Katniss’ embrace of revolution ultimately destroys the sister who she was fighting for in the first place. The rebellion in The Hunger Games, led by a woman, doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. It just replaces one boss with another, cosmetically different, but every bit as vicious. And for its part, For My Lady’s Heart doesn’t exactly forswear violence; Ruck, the hero, fights for Melanthe on a number of occasions, and while the tourneys aren’t to the death, the novel still unequivocally glories in his prowess, and in might asserted on behalf of right.

Rather than seeing YA dystopias and historical romances as opposed, then, it makes more sense to see them as thinking through related questions in complementary or overlapping ways. Can you use the tools of patriarchy, such as violence and paranoia, against patriarchy? Does forswearing those tools leave you defenseless? Is love a weakness, which gives patriarchy a hold on you, sending you to the Hunger Games (like Katniss), or into an arranged marriage (like Phoebe, in A Sweet Disorder)? Or is love a strength,  which gives you the heart to resist oppression?

Despite the similarities, I wouldn’t necessarily insist that YA dystopias should be shelved with, Romances. Genre markers are fairly arbitrary. But as in YA and historicals, that arbitrariness is itself indicative of lines of power. YA isn’t generally seen in the context of Romance novels because Romance novels simply aren’t seen; mainstream conversations about genre fiction include sci-fi and mystery and children’s lit and YA, but the genre with the largest sales and readership is almost entirely ignored.  Seeing Hunger Games and Divergent as future historicals is a way to see them as not just about the dystopia to come, but about the dystopias we’ve already (and continue) to have. And it’s also a way, perhaps, to grant Katniss and Tris their love along with their violence, and to see that they aren’t the first to wrestle with those options. They have many sisters who came before them.

Gay YA: Harry Potter, Twilight, and Nora Olsen’s Swans and Klons

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51arZc21phLYA fiction often has a complicated relationship with gay content. On the one hand, writers for young readers are often leery about presenting homosexuality.  J.K. Rowling, for example, has famously said that Dumbledore was gay  — but that revelation came at a Q&A with fans, not in the books themselves.

But while gay characters tend to be closeted or simply absent in YA, the gay experience is oddly and insistently prevalent. YA is, for obvious reasons, often focused on the process of growing up; it tends to be structured around the division between adults and children. And one of the main ways that the division between adult and child is explored, or dramatized, is by making more or less explicit parallels with the division between straight and gay.

In Harry Potter, for example, Harry’s move from childish oppression to magical power and fulfillment is accomplished through the discovery of a secret subculture living hidden in plain sight, recognizing one other through secret signs and rituals.  In Twilight, similarly, the world of the vampires and werewolves is a metaphor for the passage to adulthood.  But it’s also a queer closet which contains both pale, effeminate Edward’s refusal to have sex with Bella and hyper-masculine werewolf Jacob stripping his clothes off in front of Bella’s father.  Even in the Hunger Games, the Capitol’s Roman wrongness is visible mostly through the effeminate styles and carriage of its inhabitants. Katniss’ too-quick adulthood in the games is also a too-quick introduction to decadence, partially defined (as decadence often is) through gay tropes.

The point here is not that these series are “really” gay. Rather, as critic Eve Sedgwick argued, the point is that the queer/straight division has huge cultural power and weight. YA books tend to be about marginalization, about identity formation, about the way that you can occupy one social category one day and another the next without feeling or even looking any different. With such themes, YA authors almost can’t help using queer tropes, or being used by them.

In this context, it’s interesting to look at an actual honest-to-God, openly queer YA novel.  Nora Olsen’s Swans & Klons is set in a future where a plague has killed all the men. Women form pair bonds with each other, but reproduction is handled by the ruling doctors, who supervise the cloning of a few hundred established genotypes (or Jeepie Types.)  Some of these clones are humans, who spend devote theirs lives  to art or science or intellectual pursuits.  Others are Klons, genetically manipulated to be a docile, strong, loyal servant class.

The novel focuses on two girls — Rubric and her girlfriend (schatzie) Salmon Jo.  They’re both about to move out of the children’s dorms and onto their apprenticeships.  They are, in other words, on the cusp of adulthood, with all its queer secrets.

There are a lot of those secrets. Virtually everything you first learn about the plague and men and Klons turns out to be a lie. (Spoilers coming up, if you care about that sort of thing.)

It turns out that the Klon are not genetically different from humans after all.  They aren’t engineered to be happy servants. They just have a different tag put on their toes when they come out of the vats. They don’t lack human “intelligence and emotional development”.  The “humans” are simply taught to think they do.  Moreover, Klons are, again, drawn from the same genetically identical Jeepy Types as everyone else.  There are Klons who look exactly like Rubric, who think in much the same way Rubric thinks, who have the same genetic aptitude for aesthetics that Rubric has.  But Rubric gets to spend her  life making art, while the Klons that look just like her toil in factories or clean up filth.

The drama in Olsen’s book, then, doesn’t come from elaborating differences, or even from bridging differences, as it does in Harry Potter, or Twilight, or The Hunger Games. Rather, the plot is propelled by the realization that differences, and for that matter similarities, are arbitrary.  They’re not magic truths we understand when we become adults, but categories we impose. They may determine us, but we’re also responsible for them. To be an adult, or a child, or queer, or straight, isn’t as important as how we live in those categories, and, even more, how we make others live in them.

Rubric and Salmon Jo, horrified by their discovery, eventually free a Klon and escape from their city across the border into the wilderness. There they find that not all males have died. The Barbarous Ones (as they’ve been labeled) still bear male children, though the genetic plague causes those children to be mentally and physically deformed. Though these males will never, in some sense, become adults, the  Barbarous Ones raise them with great affection and love,

Rubric finds the males repulsive; she argues that just as her own society has bought into the delusion that Klons are nonhuman, the Barbarous Ones “have just bought into a mass delusion that Cretinous Males are really glam.”  Salmon Jo replies:

“Maybe every place has their own delusion. But I think the one here is better, kinder. You know how before we left home I said I didn’t know what human was? I know now. The Sons taught me what it means to be a human being. Even if they’re sick or not brainy, they’re just as human as us. I think they make you learn more about yourself, and that’s why the Barbarous Ones think they’re such an asset.”

It may seem odd for a lesbian novel to locate humanity paradigmatically in males, or for a Bildungsroman to find its most eloquent moral experience in perpetual childishness. But both choices are, I think, a measure  of Olsen’s refusal of easy categories. Perhaps because her queer themes are more acknowledged and controlled, she’s able to tell a YA story that isn’t about growing up to know the truth of difference (“Vampires are real!”  Magic is real!”) Instead, Swans & Klons urges its readers to define humaity as broadly and generousy as possible, so that it includes adults, and children, and everyone on the margins.