Young Adult Literature

Instant Monkeys wrote:

particle_person wrote:Something about people wandering around a deserted estate and coming face to face with a thing that mummifies you alive really disturbed me.

Hee hee, I can't imagine why!

I haven't read that book! Or maybe I have. Honestly, it's been SO many years that I barely remember. It was a rare thing that I read a book only once as a kid, so I suspect I read most of them twice, but I don't think more than that. And I don't think I was older than 10 or 11 when I read most of them. I'm going to keep an eye out for bargains and see if I can pick them up.

I loved them but was too scared to reread them.

Is it still acceptable to avoid Cassandra Clare? Sometimes I worry this is irrational. I've yet to read anything of hers because I refuse to give her my money but now she's got a series coming out with Holly Black. Who I generally like and does not seem like she's ever going to take time off. This is now the third book in the works.

And speaking of Holly Black, Black Heart was only just kind of okay. There wasn't nearly enough plot - one subplot felt thrown in simply to fill pages. The Curseworkers as a series never managed to be as good as the first novel, White Cat.

I'm still avoiding Cassie Cla(i)re. Even if I wasn't turned off by her past history, her writing does not appeal to me.

I've never read anything by her because I can't bring myself to give her my money. And yeah, I could get it from the library but I just don't wanna.

I tried to read the first Mortal Instruments book, but it read like such awful fanfic that I couldn't bear to finish it. When I finally got clued in on the fact that she actually was a fanfic writer, it made more sense. But cripes, I can't believe her work's actually been published. It's so amateurish and awful to the point of not even being laughable. Just plain bad.

I also find her writing to be irritating. She's just trying SO HARD, and it just doesn't work.

Yall I am really glad I didn't finish Jellicoe Road during my carpool. I cried SO MUCH. Like full-on ugly cry. That book was perfect. I want to go back and read it again just to pay attention to how Marchetta writes.

big chicken wrote:I'm still avoiding Cassie Cla(i)re. Even if I wasn't turned off by her past history, her writing does not appeal to me.

Me too. Sometimes I worry that I'm being unreasonable or being mean for the wrong reasons but I've never heard anything about her books that makes me curious enough to pick them up and read them.

I'm the wrong generation for Diana Wynne Jones, so I am reading Howl's Moving Castle for the first time. I'd feel bad about waiting so long, except that, now I'm an old bat myself, I can really appreciate Sophie's comment about how, as a young girl, she would have been appalled at how bossy and nosy she's being in the castle... but now that she's been turned into an old lady she's not bothered a bit. Yeah!

Re: Cassie Claire - Mortal Instruments is your basic average self-indulgent fluff. I actually enjoyed it as a quick, low expectations read, and I can see why it does well - the dialogue is funny, and it plays to some of the key teen girl fantasy/Twimom aspects that sell books like hot cakes.

I didn't pay money for the books, I borrowed copies, so my approach to them was exactly the same as when I read fanfic - had I paid good money for them, I might have felt differently. The dialogue is funny - but it's also unrealistic and despite not being directly plagiarised (this time) still owes more to 'Buffy' than it should. The main problem, though, is that it's basically a Mary-Sue...Clary is one of the most blatant examples I've ever seen. However - that's part of what sells it, because readers who go for that kind of thing can see her as THEIR self-insert too...hey, it worked for Twilight.

If CC can restrain herself from over-indulgence (I know, I know) I think Infernal Devices has a lot more potential. Certainly the story and setting are more interesting and the lead character a bit less of an obvious self-insert fantasy. She actually does come up with some interesting characters and plotlines - I can't help but wonder what her writing would have been like by now if she hadn't had legions of adoring fans for her fanfic for years, telling her everything was wonderful.

NPR now has a blog for recommending/reviewing Young Adult books.

PG-13: Risky Reads

Also NPR-related, this summer's best books poll is focused on YA. I really enjoyed last year's SF&F poll so I can't wait to see the YA results. Nominating is going on now in the comments at that link. So far the votes seem to be really skewed to recent books!

I'm reading the Weetzie Bat books for the first time, and maybe they were just overhyped to me, but I am really not into them. I'm trying to think of them as fairy tales, but the style isn't working for me. "My Secret Agent Lover Man," really?

Oh God. I tried to read those several years ago and it was like Fractured Hipster Douchebag Fairy Tales with a delicious candy coating of No One Understands My Special Feels Because No One Has Felt Like This Ever dipped in Everyone is Tragically Beautiful Floating Through This World of Pain flakes wrapped up in a pretty pink box of Francesca Lia Block Lives in LA And Is Cooler Than You Will Ever Be, Neener Neener.

...I think you have to be 14 to read them, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, most of her stuff I'm scared to reread now that I'm no longer 15. But I remember the Weetzie Bat books not being all that easy to get through, even then. I think I Was a Teenage Fairy was a lot better--more actual story, less of the affected postmodern posturing.

Yeah, I downloaded the whole series for like $2.99 on a Kindle sale a few months back. I'm probably 3/4 of the way through, but I just really kind of hate them. I'll probably finish it out at some point just because I've come this far, but it is very much not my thing.

I hate the Weetzie Bat books, I found the first one virtually unreadable and abandoned it halfway through and have not touched the rest of the series (other than the one about the gay kid which was surprisingly strong). It was books featuring teens like these (not specifically WB which I first looked at only a couple of years ago) that made me abandon the YA section of the bookstore during my teens in the 90s.

The first Francesca Lia Block book I was was the volume of fairy tales retold as short stories, The Rose and the Beast, which I used to read in spare moments in my awful part time job at a children's bookstore (I fantasised it would be a beautiful Meg Ryan type establishment but the owners were shits) I had when I was at uni. They are among the better retold fairy tales I have read, so chuck Weetzie and head straight for that instead. The slightly more gothic Blood Roses short story collection are good as well. The only novels I've read by her are Nymph and The Hanged Man, which I liked (and which mercifully lack the sparkly warkly punk princess cuteness of Weetzie Bat) but I think her forte is as a short story writer rather than a novelist. Compared to other descriptively "poetic" YA writers like Maggie Stiefvater, the lyricism and imagery of her non-Weetzie works are more focused and emotionally honest. Even though her themes are repetitive and destructive, there is a POV regarding femininity, earthiness and identity than is constant and well developed.

I'm glad I'm not the only Weetzie-hater out there. I gave up and moved on. So, so pretentious and twee, ugh.

I'm not buying NPR's explanation of what did and didn't make the cut in their YA poll. If Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and Ella Enchanted are too young, but A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Ender's Game are too old, you're left with a really narrow (and arbitrary) slice of books. To say nothing of the fact that Pride and Prejudice was deemed too all ages, but Lord of the Rings is considered okay as a primarily teens pick. I mean, really?

To be fair, given that YA is a relatively recent marketing development, I'm not sure that I could come up with fairer standards. Perhaps the entire exercise is one of futility.

Dude, there are a ton of adult selections in there too. And sorry, the Harry Potter series, as much as I love it, is not YA (the last three would qualify, I think, but if we're talking series as a whole, no). I agree with their definition of too young, but A Tree Grows is too mature? In comparison to some of the titles that ARE on the list? Oh hell no. And I have no idea why they or anyone else would define Lord of the Rings as YA.

It annoys me that last year they said Harry Potter wasn't eligible because it was going to be eligible this year, but then this year LOTR, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and The Hobbit all pop up in the YA finalists. Sooo SFF books are eligible for the YA list but not the other way around?

I know the lines of YA are blurry but there are books on the list that I have never in a million years considered YA. Hitchhiker's Guide? I love it, but YA?

Wait, they eliminated Ender's Game for violence, but Lord of the Rings gets to stay? WHAT? Did anyone actually read LotR or are they mixing it up with The Hobbit? I get that it's long enough that there's big chunks that aren't violent, but, what, did they think Peter Jackson made up the Helm's Deep battle to make the movies more exciting?

Thematically, I'd say LotR is far more adult than Ender's Game, but what do I know, I haven't read the latter since sixth grade (when at least half my class did as well). I did first try to read LotR not long after, but gave up because it was so scary I was having recurring nightmares.

And if Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret gets left off and Pride & Prejudice is too "all-ages" then I don't get why Anne of Green Gables is there, either. Especially the whole fucking series. Please do tell me what's YA about Anne's House of Dreams, because I sure missed it, what with her being a married adult. (The first one seems like it would skew too young by their weirdo definitions. And I was under the impression that the general audience/fans for Anne overall didn't really have a set age.)

Honestly, the "too violent" or "too many mature themes" seems ridiculous--I thought that WAS a big part of the YA/middle reader divide, since very often they're written at about the same reading level. Hunger Games is YA not because it would be too hard for, say, a 4th grader to read, but because the content might be a bit much at that age. (Also, teenagers don't get messed up on alcohol/drugs? They don't have unfortunate sexual encounters? This is news to me, and I ran with a pretty tame crowd in high school.)

Also, "if it won a Newberry, it doesn't count" is bullshit for anything that came out before 2000, when the Printz award didn't exist. Before that, YA was eligible for the Newberry, it just usually didn't win (which is a big part of the reason the Printz came into existence, from what I've heard).

Thank you! Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret is on the Time 100 best books of the century, it obviously deserves to be on the list. And no Tree Grows in Brooklyn is just as egregious. And the Twilight series is on there? #&@*$&$!

I'm always interested in heated debates over what's YA and what's Middle Reader (that's what it was called In My Day), because at the bookstore where I used to work, they were clearly delineated by size. We had the YA shelf, and we had the MR shelf -- all the YA books (the paperbacks at least) were regular mass-market paperback size, and all the MR books were a different size -- taller, more like a trade paperback (but made of the same crappy mass-market paper). There was no dithering about which one went on which shelf. Babysitters Club, Goosebumps, Beverly Cleary, I think most of the Judy Blumes, the Little House books, the Maud Hart Lovelace books, they were all on the MR shelf. Sweet Valley High was YA; Sweet Valley Twins was MR. Whenever I hear agonizing over whether something is YA or MR, I want to be like, just look at it; which shelf does it fit on? It's that.

On the other hand, I realize these distinctions are made by publishers -- and more than once I remember a book that was published in both the MR size and the YA size. Sometimes it would be different editions/publishers, but sometimes it'd literally be the same book, with the same cover, just in two different sizes, so it could go on both shelves. Which, to me, signalled "this book sort of falls in the middle." And basically if you're doing a poll like this, the proper dividing line doesn't seem to me to be the Newbery Award or what shelf it fits on, because you had something like A Wrinkle in Time on the MR shelf, and then you had, like, the Babysitters Club Little Sister series about Karen on that same shelf. Which was pretty clearly meant for a MUCH younger audience. And was crap, of course (sorry, Ann M. Martin or whatever your collective names are), but you know, it's hard to argue that those books are in the same universe. (Or the Goosebumps series, which was HOT LIKE FIRE when I worked there. Goddamn I got tired of picking up those stupid books after the kids threw them around all day. Anyway.) (The other R.L. Stines and the Christopher Pikes were on the YA shelf though.)

So, I don't know what I'm saying. I guess that I feel like their age cutoff is too high. But that if they really want a concrete definition for YA versus MR, it's not that hard to come by.

It's also pretty annoying to me when sci-fi or fantasy novels are considered YA just because they're full of "imaginary" stuff. Dune, seriously? I'm not saying there aren't sci-fi/fantasy novels that are pretty juvenile (OH INDEED THERE ARE) -- or that many preteens/teenagers of a certain nerdly persuasion don't gravitate toward that stuff -- but that doesn't make them YA. And yeah, LOTR isn't YA either. I'm sure this isn't news to anyone here, but didn't he write The Hobbit for his nephews or whatever, then much later decide to incorporate those characters into his SUPER SRS BZNS saga about his Silmarillion world that he'd been working on for years and years? Different animals, man.

I was a little surprised to see "the Betsy-Tacy series" on the list, too. I know the later books cover her teenage and young-adult years, but in the first book the kids are 5, for god's sake. And in the subsequent books they are 8, 10, and 12. If that's not MR territory I don't know what is.

And the violence excuse doesn't fly with any list that includes Chaos Walking. I love those books to pieces, but they are significantly more dark and violent than the Hunger Games series.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is my favorite book of all time and I read it for the first time when I was eleven. "Not YA" my ass.

The Chaos Walking trilogy is definitely way more intense and brutal than the Hunger Games series! THG had almost cartoonish violence, IMO, because there were such outlandish obstacles and manners of death whereas in Chaos Walking, the people are mostly gunned down or stabbed. The body counts in both series are quite astonishing though, and since so many beloved characters are injured and such, they're both very hard-hitting.