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The YA Wasteland 10/21/2014 10:34:16 AM
[A version of this post originally appeared on bcpthunderalley.com on October 17, 2014.]
With three teenaged nieces, I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the part of the bookstore I call The YA Wasteland.
Teen-oriented books are sort of a frightening prospect these days. The bulk of one’s choices seem to fall into one of two categories: novels about romances with supernatural creatures or novels about what it’s like to be a young celebrity. A distressing number of the latter seem to have been written by actual young celebrities, whose grasp of the English language seems dubious at best.
I have no objection to fantasy novels for teenagers. I read plenty of fantasy myself, I embrace the genre. It’s just that so much of it seems terribly formulaic. Some supernatural creature suddenly matriculates at the high school attended by a teenaged girl who carries all the hallmarks of being “Someone Special, If Only The Right Person Would Notice.” The Right Person tends to be said supernatural creature. He and Someone Special have a tortured romance. Danger and poorly written deflowering scenes ensue.
Which I suppose is better than a novel about a teen superstar who whines that no one values her for who she truly is on the inside. Then she meets some “normal” guy and they have a misunderstanding-laden relationship that ends with the heroine learning a Very Important Life Lesson. Before returning to her celebrity lifestyle. Drinking and poorly written deflowering scenes ensue.
Perhaps I simplify things. But I was frequently horrified at a lot of the books in The YA Wasteland. One needed to really dig to find some books that had something real to say and didn’t seem like trashy “fast food lit.” I didn’t need to give my nieces books filled with sex, drugs and swears. I was happy to give them fantasy-based novels, but only if they had an agenda that went dewy romance with the undead.
That’s one of the reasons I support the Hunger Games trilogy. Yes, heroine Katniss Everdeen navigates a romantic triangle over the course of three books. YA publishers all but mandate it and author Suzanne Collins is too smart to let a silly genre trope get in her way. So the putative triangle existed, but received very little time on the page. In the early parts of the story, Katniss was more worried that she and her family not starve to death or that her PTSD-stricken mother might check out on her again. She wasn’t exactly focused on which guy gave her “funny tingles” she “didn’t understand.”
The rest of Katniss’s journey was about survival, first in the arena, then in the new world that followed her victory in the first book, filled with political intrigue and dangerous, powerful enemies she couldn’t fight with just a bow and arrow. Against that backdrop, the state of her love life always fell way down on the list of things about which she worried. Publicists may have liked that they could stoke a “Team Peeta vs. Team Gale” rivalry among certain fans, but the books themselves put the focus elsewhere. And Collins resolved the triangle in a way that pretty much flipped off the expectation that a series about a strong young woman surviving a brutal world had to include a love story. She paired Katniss with the guy whose emotional trauma was most compatible with her own, more or less by default.
I turned up some other books I felt good giving to my nieces. Gayle Forman’s If I Stay had an emotional hook that was compelling. It was also another example of how a YA novel can incorporate a romance without it hijacking the entire narrative. Finding books from writers of adult fiction that I enjoy, such as Neil Gaiman or Jasper Fforde, was like stumbling onto oases of sanity in The YA Wasteland.
Recently I decided to avoid The YA Wasteland altogether and buy my nieces books from the “Classics” section. Things like Little Women or a collection of Dylan Thomas poetry. It was far less ulcer-inducing to give them something with substance that generations had read and appreciated before them.
Buying books for the teenagers in your life doesn’t seem like it will become a simpler proposition any time soon. For all the books out there in The YA Wasteland that have true quality, there’s a lot more out there that makes you despair that the people making publishing decisions don’t feel teens should shoot any higher than, say, The Hills. But by digging through the shelves, you’ll find some good stuff. It just might take longer than you’d prefer.
