Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  2000—Monster by Walter Dean Myers

  2001—Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond

  2002—AStep from Heaven by An Na

  2003—Postcardsfrom No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers

  2004—TheFirst Part Last by Angela Johnson

  2005—HowI Live Now by Meg Rosoff

  2006—Lookingfor Alaska by John Green

  2007—AmericanBorn Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

  2008—TheWhite Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean

  2009—JellicoeRoad by Melina Marchetta

  2010—GoingBovine by Libba Bray

  No matter how diverse and disparate they are, what all the winning titles have in common is richness of character, an attribute that, more than any other, separates literary from popular fiction, in which character often takes a backseat to plot. This is not to say that the Printz Award books are thinly or awkwardly plotted or do not have compelling, reader-involving stories to tell. They do—all of them. But story in these books is always in service to character. And although the actions of the characters may often contain an element of ambiguity, they are never arbitrary or dictated by the needs of a formula or a plot device. It is because they feature such fully formed, beautifully realized, multidimensional characters that these books will endure, just as the human spirit.

  In addition to this stirring and life-affirming commonality, their diversity also distinguishes the books, which is emblematic of the wonderful welter of innovations redefining the meaning of young adult literature. For example, five of the eleven winners to date were first published in a country other than the United States (Kit’s Wilderness, Postcards from No Man’s Land, How I Live Now, and The White Darkness were first published in England, and Jellicoe Road in Australia). American Born Chinese is the first graphic novel to win the Printz and augurs well for the continued aesthetic growth of a form that was once dismissed, sniffily, as just comics. That two winners —Looking for Alaska and A Step from Heaven are both first novels also evidences the field’s attraction of powerful new voices (as does the recent establishment of YALSA’s William C. Morris First Book Award).

  In the case of several of the books, the task force proved almost prescient: “Controversy is not something to avoid. In fact, we want a book that readers will talk about.” Three of the Printz winners were particularly notable for exciting controversy and discussion: Postcards from No Man’s Land, How I Live Now, and Looking for Alaska all invited visceral reactions from some readers (and reviewers) for their inclusion of sexual content. In the case of Postcards, it was the homosexuality of several characters and the ambiguous sexuality of the protagonist; with How I Live Now, it was the inclusion of a sexual relationship between two young cousins, which many regarded as incestuous; and with Alaska, the grumbles revolved around a scene involving oral sex (and others involving teenage drinking and smoking—lots of smoking!).

  Equally, if not more, controversial has been the regular appearance, in discussion, of another C word that was invoked—and invited—by the task force: complexity. Many observers have charged that the complexity of plots and characterizations in such winning titles as Jellicoe Road, The White Darkness, Postcards from No Man’s Land, and Kit’s Wilderness made them uninviting or inaccessible to teen readers. “In particular,” Sarah Cornish and Patrick Jones (2002, 353) wrote, “the buzz about several 2001 winners was that while they might be great literature, they would be a hard sell to many young adults.”

  The title that has most often excited this objection is not a Printz winner, however, but a Printz honor title: M. T. Anderson’s epic novel Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation. Published in two volumes (each of which received an honor), this ambitious historical novel of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old slave has been much criticized (another C word) not only for the complexity of its plot, structure, and theme but also for the elaborate eighteenth-century voice Anderson has created for his firstperson protagonist. Some (myself included) find such criticism particularly egregious in its wholesale discounting of the abilities of its intended audience of readers. Anderson himself has addressed this issue: “I think people don’t always give teens credit for how well they read,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “I think kids are excited by language, and they’ve not always been given credit for that” (Sellers 2008).

  In addition to the two volumes of Octavian Nothing, the Printz committees have named an additional thirty-five honor titles, many of which are notably sophisticated in their use of language, their structure, and their thematic content. Among them are Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2009), Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (both 2007), Jennifer Donnelley’s A Northern Light (2004), and Chris Lynch’s Freewill (2002). Still other honor titles evidence emerging trends that we will discuss later, including the emergence of literary nonfiction (e.g., Jack Gantos’s compelling memoir Hole in My Life and Elizabeth Partridge’s ambitious biography of John Lennon, All I Want Is Truth). Also in evidence is the renaissance of the short story (Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, 2006) and poetry for young adults (Your Own Sylvia by Stephanie Hemphill [2008]; A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson [2006]; Keesha’s House by Helen Frost [2004]; Heart to Heart, a poetry anthology edited by Jan Greenberg [2002]; and True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff [2002]).2

  But Will They Read It?

  Despite the Printz Award’s success in recognizing and encouraging literary excellence while serving as a bellwether for exciting new trends in YA literature, the prize—as noted earlier—has not been without its critics. It was dealt something of an implicit rebuff at the 2005 YALSA Best of the Best preconference. The 127 conferees were charged with selecting the best-of-the-best YA books published in the decade between 1994 and 2003. Not only were three of the five Printz winners from that period excluded (Kit’s Wilderness, Postcards from No Man’s Land, and A Step from Heaven), so were ten of the eighteen honor titles.3

  Printz winners have fared little better in another de facto best-of-the-best ranking: YALSA’s annual Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) top ten list. Long part of the process of selecting the BBYA list, the BBYA committee also chooses the top ten. Once the master list has been selected, each member then votes for his or her personal top ten books from it. The ballots are tabulated, and the books receiving the most votes constitute the top ten for that year. Through 2009, only four of the ten Printz winners and twelve of the thirty-seven honor titles had made the list. Though it (and its parent BBYA list) is supposed to represent a balance of literary quality and reader popularity, it would seem that the scales have definitely been tilted in the direction of popularity—or participating librarians’ notion of what will be popular with teens (though, to be fair, teen input is solicited throughout the BBYA selection process). The long-standing dialectic between popularity and literary merit will probably never be resolved, and such debate can be a healthy and intellectually stimulating process. Nevertheless, when one is talking about selecting best books, popularity alone is no measure of merit. If it were, the Printz would automatically be awarded to Stephenie Meyer (Twilight series) each year, and there would be no need for discussion. Nor is it enough simply to toss an aesthetically noteworthy title into a new book bin and expect it to sell itself. After all, one reason adult gatekeepers—librarians and teachers—are involved with young adult literature is to bring their maturity of judgment and their greater experience of reading to the process of putting teens and excellent books together. Sometimes this means fast talking and strenuous selling, but surely a successful sale is worth the labor, no matter how herculean.

  If literary fiction is often regarded as more popular with adults than with teens, the same is routinely said of two of its constituent forms, the short story and poetry, which have also experienced a period of rapid revival and growth in the wake of the overall YA renaissance. Again, this lack of popularity seems counterintuitive. After all, the defining aspect of the short story—its shortness�
��would seem to be an irresistible lure for attention-span-challenged teens. Poetry, too, is often an exercise in brevity, and teens seem to love the emotionally cathartic experience of writing it. But the received wisdom is that teens resist every effort to persuade them to read either short stories or poetry. Is the received wisdom wrong? Let’s examine each form in turn and try to find out.

  The Short Story Revival

  The short story as an American literary form dates back to the early 1800s and the work of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Later in the same century, it flourished in the hands of Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank R. Stockton, Bret Harte, O. Henry, and—in the early twentieth century—Sherwood Anderson. The form hit its stride in the 1930s and 1940s in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and, in the 1950s, of J. D. Salinger, John O’Hara, John Cheever, and the whole coterie of New Yorker magazine writers who redefined the form. But then in the sixties and seventies, the market for the short story began to decline as the general interest magazine, which had always been its home, went into eclipse. But the story is a durable form, and it rebounded in the eighties in the minimalist work of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and others. This was also the decade in which MFA programs in creative writing began appearing in U.S. universities and fastened on the short story as “the instructional medium of choice.” “The majority of people who enroll in these programs want to be novelists,” Charles McGrath (2004b, B1) wryly wrote in the New York Times, “but novels don’t lend themselves very readily to the workshop format, and so would-be novelists these days spend at least part of their apprenticeship working on stories.”

  This equation of the form with the academic suggests a major reason short stories have been such a hard sell to teens. They have traditionally been used for instructional purposes in America’s high school classrooms. Worse, like most other required reading, they have too often been dusty works from the adult literary canon that offer little of relevance to the lives or interests of contemporary teens. This situation began to change in the eighties when—encouraged by the renaissance of the form in adult publishing—pioneering young adult anthologists like Donald Gallo and Hazel Rochman began assembling thematically related collections of short stories, many of them written specifically for the collection by established young adult authors.

  Gallo, who must be regarded as the godfather of the contemporary YA short story collection, published his first, Sixteen, in 1985. This was followed by Visions in 1988 and Connections in 1990. Rochman’s first, Somehow Tenderness Survives, a collection of stories about South Africa, appeared in 1988 and was followed in 1993 by Who Do You Think You Are? Stories of Friends and Enemies (coedited with Darlene Z. McCampbell).

  Rochman has written about the necessary characteristics of such anthologies. “It’s helpful,” she noted in a 1998 “YA Talk” piece for Booklist, “for teen readers, especially reluctant ones, to have a theme that grabs them, a cover that looks like them, and some connection to lead them from one story to the next” (Rochman 1998, 1234).

  This new kind of anthology—the theme-driven collection of original work commissioned expressly for the book—quickly became enormously popular. In 1997 a half dozen were included on YALSA’s Best Books and Quick Picks lists. In the meantime, well-known YA novelists had begun assembling anthologies, too, among them Harry Mazer, Anne Mazer, Lois Duncan, Marilyn Singer, Judy Blume, James Howe, and others. Such name authors certainly excited new interest among young adult readers already familiar with and well disposed to their work.

  Of perhaps greater interest in literary terms, however, was the quick emergence of single-author collections. Among the first of these were Gary Soto’s Baseball in April (1990) and Chris Crutcher’s Athletic Shorts (1991). Others have followed by a veritable who’s who of writers, including David Almond, Francesca Lia Block, Bruce Coville, Diana Wynne Jones, Kelly Link, Chris Lynch, Beverly Naidoo, Graham Salisbury, Tim Wynne-Jones, and many others. In terms of sheer literary excellence, such collections hit a new peak with the publication of Australian author Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice, a brilliantly imaginative collection of speculative stories selected as a 2006 Printz honor title. (Though a single-author collection, it is also an example of another newish kind of anthology in which genre, not theme, provides the basis for commonality: for example, Kelly Link’s Pretty Monster and Deborah Noyes’s Gothic!)

  The popularity of the short story (and the decreasing attention span of teens) is also responsible for a new literary form that began to emerge in the 1990s: the novel as collection of linked stories. Among the first of these were three heart-stoppingly good books: Bruce Brooks’s What Hearts, Chris Lynch’s Whitechurch, and E. R. Franks’s Life Is Funny. Other notable works in this form that have followed include Kathi Appelt’s Kissing Tennessee, Walter Dean Myers’s 145th Street, Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder, Ellen Wittlinger’s What’s in a Name? and—most recently—Margo Rabb’s critically acclaimed Cures for Heartbreak. The constituent parts of such books usually have stand-alone coherence and, thus, appeal to those time- and attention-span-challenged teens, but the stories cannot be read at random like those in a collection. They must be read in the order of their presentation, as one would read a novel. This experience of reading is, I think, wonderfully like that of living. After all, human lives themselves are series of sometimes-significant moments that seem individual and isolated until enough time has passed to offer opportunity for reflection and the attendant emergence of context. The same is true of these books. Each story is individual, yet at the end, the reader can see how the apparently discontinuous is, in fact, part of a larger continuity and that the isolated is, in fact, linked, connected to other events that, together, offer coherent sense (and, in the case of books, sensibility). We will examine what part another exercise in isolation and linkage, the Internet, may play in the evolution of fiction in a later chapter. But for the moment, suffice it to say that the short story, presented in imaginative forms and formats, seems to have overcome original reader reluctance to become an exceedingly durable form. But what about poetry?

  A Poetry Renaissance

  As the evergreen appeal of Mother Goose evidences, small children love cadence and rhyme. However, their taste for poetry seems to decrease as an inverse function of their age. By the time they have finished elementary school, most kids are no longer engaged by verse (nor are critics: I confess I gave no attention to this form in the first edition of this book, while Nilsen and Donelson [2009] devote only 10 pages to it in the 491-page eighth edition of their textbook). Once again, this diminishing interest is pretty clearly a function of adolescents’ association of poetry with the classroom and the dreaded phrase “required reading.” Holly Koelling (2007) discusses this lack of popularity (and audience!) in her analysis of the Best Books for Young Adults lists from 2000 to 2006. There she notes that only three works of poetry (0.5 percent of the total) appear on the seven annual lists. This is hardly an anomaly. In looking at the six Best of the Best Books lists that YALSA has assembled periodically since 1974, one finds only six works of poetry represented out of 530 titles (0.01 percent)! Four of the titles are anthologies—Stephen Dunning’s Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, R. R. Knudson and May Swenson’s American Sports Poems, Paul B. Janeczko’s The Place My Words Are Looking For: What Poets Say about and through Their Poems, and Lori Carlson’s Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing up Latino in the United States—and two, Mel Glenn’s Class Dismissed: High School Poems and Cynthia Rylant’s Something Permanent, are single-author works.

  As is the case with short story anthologies, theme is of overarching importance. The poet and anthologist Janeczko says, “If poetry is to do more than furnish answers on a multiple-choice test, we must relate poetry to the real world, finding poems that are connected with something that happened at school, in the community, or in the world” (Cart 2001, 1390).

  Another successful anthologis
t, Ruth Gordon, agrees that “a theme that will appeal” makes a successful collection but notes that a fundamental cause of poetry’s lack of popularity is that “so many people are afraid of it because of the form and its perceived formality; they have been taught to read incorrectly and they are not taught how to read poetry for themselves” (Cart 1997, 1570).

  Something of a sea change began visiting poetry in the mid-nineties, when American culture began taking new cognizance of the form. In 1996 the Academy of American Poets, with the support of a number of other organizations, including the American Library Association, succeeded in having April designated as National Poetry Month. A decade earlier, in 1986, the librarian of Congress had appointed Robert Penn Warren as America’s first official poet laureate, raising the public profile of the literary form. Public television and the Internet also made poetry vastly more accessible, as did the surge in popularity of coffeehouses, which—shades of the beat poetry movement of the 1950s—began sponsoring open-mic poetry nights and poetry slams, events that young adult librarians discovered and that became, almost overnight, staple fixtures of their programming for teens.