Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  There’s no gainsaying the sex appeal of the books and the part it has played in their popularity with pubescent teens, a popularity reinforced by the November 2008 release of the film Twilight, which grossed more than $382 million worldwide (Schuker 2009). The second film was released exactly a year later in November 2009 to similar heavy breathing. As for Harry Potter, sex was always a secondary consideration, though as the boy wizard and his friends grew into adolescence in the later books, romantic attraction certainly became a subtext, which then became a major marketing point for the sixth Potter film. “As the new Harry Potter movie opens next week,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “the bespectacled wizard faces a new challenge: how to compete for the attention of a young audience that has been growing up—and is starting to prefer the angsty teen romances and cooler, edgier characters of the ‘Twilight’ books and movies” (Schuker 2009).

  Perhaps. But there is one area where there is no competition between the rival franchises, and that is literary quality. There Rowling is clearly the superior—and more serious—writer. Meyer, though a natural storyteller with a thorough understanding of her readers’ interests, is no stylist, and her four-volume saga shows little promise of ever becoming part of any literary canon. This is as much the genre’s fault as it is hers, however. It’s hard to take books that focus on “sculpted, incandescent chests,” “scintillating arms,” and “glistening pale lavender lids” very seriously (quotes from Twilight, p. 260), although Annette Curtis Klause did a quite memorable job with the vampire romance in her YA novel Silver Kiss (and later served the werewolf romance well, too, with Blood and Chocolate).

  Nevertheless, romance and horror fiction (including the latter’s vampire subgenre) have long and honorable histories. Some, in fact, trace romance back to the very genesis of the novel and such classic titles as Richardson’s Pamela, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and—somewhat later—the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Similarly, horror had its origins in Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto and Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, while the vampire novel traces its beginnings to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. When written for young adult readers, however, the two genres typically find their expression not in stand-alone titles but in series, some disposable (like the Sweet Valley High romances and the horror fictions of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike) and others with perhaps slightly more substance (those by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and the pseudonymous Darren Shan come to mind). Too, a few memorable individual titles have appeared: think M. T. Anderson’s first novel Thirsty and some of the later work of Neil Gaiman, notably Coraline and his Newbery Medal–winning The Graveyard Book (though Gaiman told Booklist’s Ray Olsen (2002, 1949), “Do I think of myself as a horror writer? No, I don’t except that I love horror”). While not always easy to classify, some of the novels of William Sleator may also be regarded as horror (but none as romance!), and his 2004 novel The Boy Who Couldn’t Die (Amulet) helped usher in a minitrend in zombie books; this subsequently merged with chick lit to give us such books as Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (Delacorte); Zombie Blondes by Brian James (Feiwel and Friends); Generation Dead by Daniel Waters (Hyperion), and more.

  Speculative Fiction

  As is the case with Sleator’s work, much of contemporary imaginative fiction—like romance—has become an interesting exercise in bending and blending, in shape-shifting and morphing. In the second edition of her standard work Teen Genreflecting, for example, Diana Tixier Herald has no separate section for horror, assigning it to the more amorphous category “paranormal.” Science fiction, though still a separate category, has never matched the popularity of fantasy; indeed, only 5 percent of the titles on BBYA lists since 2000 (no more than twenty-eight in all) can be classed as science fiction, and many observers see it morphing with fantasy into something called speculative fiction.

  Interestingly enough, however, this youngest of the genres—often regarded as a twentieth-century phenomenon (though rooted in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century work of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells)—is represented by three winners of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement in Young Adult Literature: Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Orson Scott Card. Even here, though, there is some room for ambiguity. McCaffrey’s most celebrated work—her Pern novels—are often regarded as fantasy, for example, because they feature dragons; similarly, LeGuin’s books also operate on the cusp between traditional science fiction and fantasy, and Card—though more clearly a science fiction practitioner—has never been published for young adults, though he is widely read by them. (The only other genre writer to have won the Edwards is mystery-suspense writer Lois Duncan.)

  Of all the genres, however, it is classic fantasy that has produced the most serious works of literature, perhaps because it is the oldest category. In fact, a case could be made that it originated as early as the eighth century with Beowulf (the writer Harlan Ellison dates it even earlier, to the Epic of Gilgamesh!). As a form it also incorporates timeless folklore and fairy tale, though the most memorable codifications of these stories date only to the early nineteenth century, and what we regard as modern fantasy fiction didn’t appear until 1865, with Alice in Wonderland. And like Alice, much of classic fantasy is regarded as children’s literature. In fact, very little successful work of the imagination has been published specifically for young adults, perhaps because the field—with its narrow focus on realistic fiction—has been regarded as inhospitable. This is not to say that fantasy hasn’t been published, but established gatekeepers have generally failed to recognize it, and its fans have long been critical of the annual Best Books for Young Adults lists, which, in the past, conspicuously lacked such genre titles.

  But times change. According to Holly Koelling (2007, 64), “Fantasy accounts for almost fifteen percent of the 577 books on BBYA lists since 2000, the same share as nonfiction and exceeded only by general fiction.” The critic and former publisher Anita Silvey (2006, 47) seems to agree: “Instead of craving realistic stories about people like themselves, today’s teens are crazy about characters (and scenarios) that have little in common with their everyday lives. Today’s adolescents are flocking to fantasy, suspense, and mystery.”

  Is this all due to the success of Harry Potter? Not entirely, I think. One of fantasy’s most attractive features has always been its implicit invitation to escape this careworn world for a visit to a more appealing one, if only in one’s imagination. Some need this escape more than others. As the fantasist Tamora Pierce has eloquently stated, “Fantasy is also important to a group that I deeply hope is small: those whose lives are so grim that they cling to everything that takes them completely away for any length of time.” In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, worldwide economic distress, and the specter of global warming, this invitation to escape has surely became increasingly attractive and the group accepting it, ever larger. “Fantasy,” Pierce (1993, 51) rightly notes, “creates hope and optimism in readers. It is the pure stuff of wonder.”

  Or is it dread, instead? One of the most interesting trends in recent speculative fiction is the rise of the dystopian novel, a literary form that imagines—sometimes satirically, sometimes somberly—a future world made even worse than the present one by the logical extension of current or threatened societal ills. In M. T. Anderson’s Feed, for example, the problem is consumerism gone mad; in Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion, it is human cloning; in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies quartet, it is the evergreen adolescent obsession with appearance and celebrity; in Susan Collins’s The Hunger Games, it is an intriguing combination of dictatorial central government and the current passion for television reality shows. Sometimes the dystopia is the product of technology gone wrong, as in Jeanne Du Prau’s Books of Ember series or Mary Pearson’s Adoration of Jenna Fox, or it might be the result of rampant abuse of the environment (David Klass’s The Caretaker Trilogy) or anothe
r kind of abuse—that of civil liberties as in Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Occasionally, though, the awfulness is not humans’ doing at all but an asteroid’s, as in Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It and its companion novel The Dead and the Gone. Regardless of the cause, all of these books have in common the bleakness of their vision of the future. What kind of escape does the reading of them provide an angst-ridden adolescent? Probably the same kind of release and relief that reading horror fiction provides: the luxury of being scared out of one’s wits while thinking, “It’s only a book; it’s only a book.” But as cautionary stories, such dystopian fiction can also serve a larger purpose, inviting idealistic teens to examine the logical consequences of illogical human behavior and to consider how their own actions—or failures to act—might affect the future of the planet and humanity. And therein lies reason for hope, or at least cautious optimism.

  The two writers whose work offers—in my estimation—the richest infusion of the imaginative into assessments of what can only be called the human condition are David Almond and Philip Pullman. Almond’s first book to appear in the United States, Skellig, was a Printz honor book, and his second—Kit’s Wilderness—won the Printz outright (in England, Skellig won the Carnegie Medal, and Kit’s Wilderness was shortlisted for the same prize). These two haunting books, as well as those that have followed—Heaven Eyes, Secret Heart, The Fire Eaters, Clay, and Raven Summer among them—are nearly impossible to classify but abound in wonders and challenges to their readers’ imaginations. As a character in his 2002 novel Secret Heart aptly puts it, “The most important things are the most mysterious.” The character might well be speaking for Almond himself, and as a result, his books are filled with magical realism and exquisite examinations of light and dark, good and evil, finding magic, metaphor, and larger meaning in their northern England settings that provide the quotidian foundation for so many of his books.

  Like Almond, Pullman is also interested in the large issues that generally find expression in high fantasy. In his most ambitious work, the three-volume His Dark Materials series, this is clearly the same dialectic between good and evil that inspired Milton’s Paradise Lost. Though Pullman writes prose, not poetry, his language—like Almond’s—is often soaring, and even majestic, resulting in a style that matches the richness and complexity of his thematic material. The final volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, received the 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children’s book of the year in England and was then named Whitbread Book of the Year, the first time a children’s book had ever won this prestigious prize. This speaks not only to the intrinsic excellence of the book but also to the coming of age of books for young readers as literature. And, it should be noted, that though published as a children’s book, Amber Spyglass is very clearly a young adult novel. Just as each succeeding volume of the Harry Potter series became more sophisticated, so did each volume in Pullman’s trilogy.

  Unlike the Harry Potter books, which stimulated numerous challenges from religious conservatives, Pullman’s have excited relatively little controversy in the United States. This is ironic, as Pullman’s are by far the more subversive books. Though he is hardly “the most dangerous author in Britain,” as one conservative columnist dubbed him, he does have serious reservations about organized religion and one of his characters calls Christianity “a very powerful and convincing mistake” (Miller 2005/2006, 52).

  Nevertheless, Pullman is a passionate believer in the moral authority—or perhaps capacity would be a better word—of fiction, remarking in a lecture, “We can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean from fiction.” Or, as he has also noted, “‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart” (Miller 2005/2006, 54). His stories—and Almond’s, too—bear eloquent witness to the truth of that.

  Other Genre Fiction

  Historical Fiction

  Like fantasy, historical fiction has a long and distinguished—uh—history, beginning with Sir Walter Scott’s 1814 novel Waverly. But like fantasy, it, too, was not a terribly significant presence in young adult literature until recently. The belief among publishers and adult gatekeepers alike was that young readers were too interested in themselves to embrace stories of the long ago and far away. “‘Children only want to read about people like themselves,’ teachers assure me,” the distinguished novelist Katherine Paterson (1999, 1430) has lamented. The historical novelist Ann Rinaldi (2009) agrees. “When I wrote my first historical 27 years ago [c. 1982] all the publishers said much the same thing. ‘We can’t give children history. No bookstore will carry it, no child will read it.’”

  This belief seems to have become even more firmly entrenched when applied to notoriously solipsistic young adults who, it was believed, would read only realistic fiction with contemporary settings. “In my experience,” Jen Hubert wrote at her popular website Reading Rants, “most teens won’t even look at hist. fic. unless they have to read it for a school assignment.”5

  This began to change as YA literature became ever more expansive starting in the mid-1990s. Indeed, by the end of the decade, historical fiction had become a significant new category of young adult literature. In 2000 when I assembled my annual list of the best young adult books of the year, I was startled to see that fully twenty-one of the sixty-one works of fiction on my list fell into the historical fiction category, and twenty-seven then appeared on my 2001 list.

  A major catalyst for the rise of historical fiction in the 1990s was Scholastic’s introduction, in 1996, of its hugely popular Dear America series. These fictional girls’ diaries, set in various significant periods of American history, rapidly became enormously popular. Within two years, there were 3.5 million copies of the first twelve titles in print. A companion series for boys, My Name Is America, soon followed, as did two others: the Royal Diaries and My America.

  The immediacy of the diary form may well have been part of the series’ appeal but so was its innovative format: Scholastic’s Jean Feiwel told Publishers Weekly, “Our intention was to create a book that was a replica of an actual diary” (Lodge 1998, 31). This meant publication in hardcover (a novelty for series fiction at the time) and in a trim size that was slightly smaller than the standard. The price, a low $9.95, was also unusual and, as it turned out, unusually attractive to booksellers. So once again, the retail market became instrumental in developing a new YA trend.

  The hardcover format itself lent a certain patina of respectability to this new exercise in series fiction, but so, too, did the extraordinary roster of distinguished authors whom Scholastic commissioned to write for its new series: Joseph Bruchac, Karen Hesse, Carolyn Meyer, Jim Murphy, Walter Dean Myers, Ann Rinaldi, and still more. (Interestingly, though, to maintain the polite fiction that the books were actual diaries, the authors’ names—no matter how celebrated—did not appear on the books’ covers.)

  Like the other genres we have explored, historical fiction also lends itself to genre bending and blending. Indeed, “blending with other genres is the most conspicuous trend in historical fiction,” expert reader’s advisor Joyce Saricks (2008, 33) wrote. There are, for example, historical romances, historical mysteries, historical adventures, and even—in the form of alternative histories—historical fantasies. Saricks also noted one more interesting trend: “Books that combine historical elements with contemporary story lines have become enormously popular.” Two excellent YA examples of this are Aidan Chambers’s Postcards from No Man’s Land and Mal Peet’s Tamar, both of which find meaning for contemporary lives by revisiting World War II. (The routine injection of lengthy flashbacks is another fairly recent innovation in YA fiction.)

  All of these disparate elements have conspired to turn historical fiction from required reading to pleasure reading. As the hip (and always engaging!) Hubert noted, in presenting teens with her own list, Historical Fiction for Hipsters: Stories from the Past That Won’t Make You Snore, “Sure, you
may not know much about history, but learning it from these juicy fictional accounts is way more fun than memorizing any old, dry textbook.”6

  The growing popularity of historical fiction expanded the genre’s portfolio well beyond series fiction. Like the entire field of YA, historical fiction has, since the end of the nineties, become home to significant works of literature. Indeed, I would argue that four of the best young adult novels of the past quarter century are historical novels: Aidan Chambers’s Postcards from No Man’s Land, Mildred Taylor’s The Land, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and M. T. Anderson’s two-volume The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. All brilliantly conceived and written, these four titles are further enriched by the very largeness and complexity of their themes, which include war, slavery, and the Holocaust. Each invites us to reexamine our understanding of the human condition and to expand our moral sensibility. One can hardly ask or expect more from literature.

  The world embraced by the term historical fiction is, of course, a bit of a moving target as today constantly confounds us by turning into yesterday. Time is notable for its passage (or winged flight, as we used to say), and so today’s contemporary novel will inevitably turn into tomorrow’s historical fiction. A good example of this is Walter Dean Myers’s singular novel of the Vietnam War, Fallen Angels. When it was first published in 1988, only thirteen years had passed since the end of the Vietnam War, which would, thus, have been within the lived experience of at least its oldest YA readers and was unequivocally a huge part of the lives of those readers’ parents and grandparents. As this is written, however, another twenty-two years have passed, and the war’s end has now receded to a point thirty-five years in the past. Those old enough to have fought in Vietnam are now old enough to be the grandparents of contemporary teens, which means that Fallen Angels has inarguably turned from a novel of current events into a work of historical fiction.