Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  Literature is inherently dynamic and never more so than when it is young adult literature. Trends come and go, and so it is no surprise that the boom in young adult historical fiction may well have peaked, though I would not go so far as Ann Rinaldi (2009), who lamented, “Now, all of a sudden, the whole ball game seems to be over. We’re back where we began. Things have come full circle. Historical novels for teens seem to be chopped liver again.” I daresay Richard Peck—for one—would disagree with her; his genial novels of the past—books like A Year Down Yonder, A Long Way from Chicago, On the Wings of Heroes, and last year’s A Season of Gifts—remain hugely popular. But he might be the exception. Time, as always, will tell.7

  Meanwhile what has changed, it seems to me, is the routine presence of realistic fiction set—now and without any fanfare—not in the present but in the decades of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. As a reviewer, I’ve been bemused by the number of these books that don’t even mention the precise date of their setting, leaving that to the reader to puzzle out from cultural and other topical references in the text. I don’t know that there are any significant lessons to be learned here except that younger authors are increasingly writing about their own adolescent years, but perhaps today’s teens will also find evidence in these books of the truth of the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” for—no matter how much settings and circumstances change—human beings remain human.

  Mystery and Suspense

  For many years, mystery and suspense offered the fewest titles published specifically for young adults—and those that were all seemed to be written by either Lois Duncan or Joan Lowery Nixon. But like every other aspect of the YA field, this, too, has changed. One evidence of the new significance of YA mystery-suspense was the 1989 establishment of a young adult category among the annual Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards.

  Perhaps as a consequence a host of new writers have begun experimenting with this form—writers like Carol Plum-Ucci, whose The Body of Christopher Creed received a Printz Honor Award in 2001; Nancy Werlin, whose work often evokes that of Robert Cormier; and Kevin Brooks, a British writer whose publisher, the Chicken House, specializes in mystery and speculative fiction and whose books are distributed in the United States by Scholastic. Other notable names include Joyce Armstrong, Willo Davis Roberts, Chap Reaver, Gail Giles, Alex Flinn, Canadian writer Graham McNamee, and more.

  As is the case with other genres, there is no shortage of newly popular mystery series, among them Wendelin Van Draanen’s already established Sammy Keyes series; Alex Horowitz’s hugely popular Alex Rider novels (and a seeming myriad of other new series by him); Julia Golding’s promising Cat Royal series of historical mysteries; and Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s Samurai mysteries set in eighteenth-century Japan. None of these, it is safe to predict, will ever match the enduring popularity—or influence—of the indefatigable girl sleuth Nancy Drew, whose name was once again in the news in 2009 when Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor acknowledged her early passion for the series, a passion that had earlier been acknowledged by sitting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Such other movers and shakers as Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Oprah Winfrey, and the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker have also publicly pledged their own undying allegiance to Nancy.

  Last, the crossover phenomenon has also visited this genre. Among the established adult authors who have begun writing mysteries for young readers are Peter Abrahams, John Feinstein, Michael Winerip, and—most notably—Carl Hiaasen and James Patterson. And in the old-is-new-again department, the British writer Charlie Higson has begun writing a series of thrillers about Ian Fleming’s James Bond as a teenager.

  Notes

  1. My own personal affirmation of this came when, in the fall of 2000, I was browsing in the YA section of the Barnes & Noble store in Chico, California, and—to my absolute astonishment—came across several hardcover copies of my then newly published book Tomorrowland.

  2. It should be noted, at least in passing, that starting with the ninth volume, the Gossip Girl books—and the later spin-off series—were all ghostwritten, though they continued to bear von Ziegesar’s name as author.

  3. Alloy Media + Marketing, “Alloy Entertainment,” www.alloymarketing.com/ entertainment/index.html.

  4. By the time the seventh title was published in 2007, the first printing had grown to 12 million copies, and the book sold an unbelievable 8.3 million copies in the first twenty- four hours of publication—that’s 50,000 copies per minute!

  5. www.readingrants.org/category /historical-fiction-for-hipsters/.

  6. www.readingrants.org /category/historical-fiction-for-hipsters/.

  7. Five months after Rinaldi’s dire evaluation, her next historical novel, Leigh Ann’s Civil War (Harcourt, 2009), was published.

  so, how adult is

  young adult?

  The Crossover Conundrum

  Though crossover books is a relatively new term, at least one aspect of the phenomenon it contemplates—the notion that young people will read books published for adults—is scarcely a new one. Three hundred years ago, for example, children were avidly reading Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, so many, in fact, that over the years those classics have come to be regarded as children’s books. More recently, so many teens have read and embraced Seventeenth Summer, The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Lord of the Flies that it is now commonplace to say that, if these books were published today, they’d be released as YA literature. Nevertheless, until recently publishers seemed oddly unwilling to capitalize on this.

  Only twenty years ago, for example, Betty Carter (1988, 60), who had chaired the 1986 Best Books for Young Adults Committee, wrote a fascinating article for School Library Journal in which she wryly noted that the New York Times, in its review of Marianne Gingher’s newly published short story collection Teen Angel, had stated, “It is perhaps even more damaging to the author’s reputation as a writer for grown ups that the American Library Association named Ms. Gingher’s novel ‘Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit’ one of its Best Books for Young Adults for 1986.”

  I had a similar experience in 1990 when I interviewed the author Mark Childress, who told me that his publisher, Knopf, was refusing to publicize the fact that his adult novel V for Victor had just been named to that year’s BBYA list. Clearly there was a feeling abroad that an appeal to teen readers somehow tainted an adult title.

  That situation was about to change. In fact, it already had changed in another category of publishing: that of picture books for children.

  Picture Book Crossovers

  “Say ‘crossover book’ to most people in the industry,” Sally Lodge (1992, 38) wrote in 1992, “and they immediately focus on the picture book that appeals to adults as well as kids.” This new interest in a form that previously had been targeted at kids in the kindergarten-third grade group had begun in the late 1980s with the publication of Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Viking, 1989). The instant success of this wackily irreverent, ironic, sophisticated, and offbeat retelling of a classic story quickly attracted the attention of other innovative author-artists such as William Joyce, J. Otto Sebold, Maira Kalman, and Istvan Banyai. When Scieszka and Smith’s second collaboration, The Stinky Cheese Man (Viking, 1992), received both a Caldecott Medal and a spot on the Best Books for Young Adults list in 1993, the success of the new crossover form was cemented.

  When I subsequently spoke with Viking’s president and publisher Regina Hayes about this, she acknowledged the sophistication of these picture books but argued, “There’s very little that escapes kids. They’re growing up in a highly visual age and because they are subject to influences that are so much broader than they used to be—sophisticated graphics, TV, comics, magazines, and so forth—they grow up with a sense of parody that wasn’t part of kids’ consciousness before.” Hayes also saluted the earlie
r, seminal influence of the late James Marshall (creator of the Stupids, George and Martha, the Cutups, Miss Nelson, and so on). “When I first saw Jim’s books, I said ‘This is something really new.’ I began to realize,” she continued, “in part because my own kids responded so strongly to his books and never seemed to outgrow them, that his humor appealed on many different levels” (Cart 1995b, 695).

  Another artist who shook up the storytelling strategies and design conventions of the picture book while expanding its audience to older readers was David Macaulay, whose groundbreaking Black and White received the Caldecott Medal in 1989 and inspired Eliza Dresang’s pioneering critical work Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age (Wilson, 1999) a decade later. Macaulay, of course, is notable for his interest in the architecture not only of the picture book but also that of cathedrals, castles, pyramids, mosques, and even the human body, all subjects of his continuing series of nonfiction picture books that examine, in extraordinarily detailed drawings, how things are built and the way they work. In book after book, Macaulay (1991, 419) has shown, as he stated in his Caldecott acceptance speech, “that it is essential to see, not merely to look, that words and pictures can support each other; that it isn’t necessary to think in a straight line to make sense; and, finally, that risk can be rewarded.”

  Still other risk-taking artists have followed, all of them creating unconventional picture books that challenge expectations and excite the attention of older readers. Chief among them is Peter Sis, the Czech American artist, whose sometimes autobiographical books like The Wall, Tibet: Inside the Red Box, and The Three Golden Keys are marvels of creative energy, thematic subtlety, and visual imagination. Both his picture book biography of Charles Darwin, The Tree of Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) and his autobiographical book The Wall (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) were selected as Best Books for Young Adults.

  The Marketing and Maturing of the Crossover

  With the ice of a multigenerational market broken, publishers began cautiously experimenting with promoting YA books to adults, helped along by the word-of-mouth discovery by twenty- and thirty-something readers of Francesca Lia Block’s five Weetzie Bat books. These were collected and published in an omnibus volume in 1998 with the title Dangerous Angels.

  “We’re giving it an adult trade trim with an adult look and a quote from ‘Spin’ magazine,” its publisher Joanna Cotler explained, adding, “We’re also giving it a reading group brochure like our adult books” (Rosen 1997, 29). To further its cross-market appeal, the book was also listed in both Harper’s adult and children’s catalogs.

  Robert Cormier was another author who had always demonstrated potential crossover appeal, never more so than with his most ambitious novel Fade, which Delacorte published as a YA title in 1988 and then released as a massmarket adult paperback the following year. Two years after that, the book was reissued as a YA trade paperback. Similarly, Scholastic first issued Walter Dean Myers’s Vietnam War novel Fallen Angels as a YA hardcover and then as a mass-market adult paperback. The same thing would happen with A. M. Homes’s novel Jack and Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass.

  Pullman’s extremely sophisticated literary-metaphysical fantasy would probably have excited adult interest without any particular help from its American publisher, Knopf. But Knopf’s parent company, Random House, pulled out all the promotional stops, giving the 1996 book a $250,000 marketing budget and offering a classic case study of how a children’s book could cut across the lines implicitly dividing the myriad imprints that comprise a major publishing house. Thus, Del Ray, Random’s adult fantasy and science fiction imprint, quickly acquired paperback rights to Compass and its two projected sequels, while Random House Audio Books acquired its own rights, making Compass the first children’s book that Random House had ever put on tape. Carl Lennertz, director of marketing for the Knopf Group, ordered a thousand advance reading copies and sent them to independent booksellers and wholesalers with a note saying (rather patronizingly, it now seems), “Dear Bookseller: Be a kid again” (Alderdice 1996, 24). Subsequently, seven thousand copies of a more lavish advance reader’s copy were distributed to librarians, reviewers, and booksellers. Both the Book of the Month Club and the Children’s Book of the Month Club then chose Compass as an alternate selection.

  Two years later, the first Harry Potter book appeared in the United States, and a year after that (1999), another wildly successful crossover series debuted with the publication of The Bad Beginning, the first volume of the mock-gothic Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events. It was followed, over the next seven years, by twelve more titles (and the obligatory movie, starring Jim Carrey).

  In the years since, the crossover book has become such an engrained publishing phenomenon that it is hard to believe that, as recently as 1992, Sally Lodge (1992, 38) wrote, “They [adults] seem to shun the idea of reading a novel published as a young adult book. One of the key barriers appears to be adults’ lack of interest in reading about a young protagonist.” Or that Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit could ever have been called “one of the relatively rare books that transcends age as a criterion for potential readership” (Carter 1988, 60).

  If Block, Cormier, Pullman, and Rowling demonstrated that adults would, indeed, read about young protagonists in books published (at least initially) for young readers, two other books clearly evidenced the coming of age of the crossover phenomenon and the increased blurring of the line that divided adult books from young adults (and vice versa): the first was the British writer Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Double-day, 2003) and the second was the American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (Random House, 2004).

  Perhaps because Haddon was already an established writer for children in England, Curious Incident, a haunting story of a teenage boy with Asperger’s syndrome, was published there in simultaneous children’s and adult editions. When it was subsequently released in the United States, however, it appeared only as an adult title, though it immediately became hugely popular with young adult readers. A similar thing happened with the Canadian author Yann Martel’s exquisitely inventive novel Life of Pi, which was also published in the United States as an adult title. In this case, however, Harcourt, its publisher, recognized the title’s crossover appeal and subsequently issued a YA paperback edition.

  Why American publishers cannot simply replicate the sensible British model of simultaneity has been much discussed and debated in the years since. Meg Rosoff, an American-born author living in London whose three books to date (including her Printz Award–winning How I Live Now) have all been published there in both YA and adult editions, has said “there’s less of a stigma against young adult literature” in Britain (Rabb 2008, 23).

  Be that as it may, the crossover phenomenon has excited as much interest in the United Kingdom as it has in the United States. Indeed, five of the six books shortlisted for the 2004 Carnegie Medal (Britain’s equivalent to the Newbery) were crossover titles. Four years later, Amanda Craig, the children’s critic of the London Times, wrote, “Crossover books—novels that appeal to adults as much as they do to children—are the publishing phenomenon of the past decade.” Craig (2008) attributes the success of the crossover book to the plodding dullness of contemporary adult literary fiction. “It is the power of story-telling which, however, lies at the heart of the crossover novel’s rise.”

  Perhaps so, though the Canadian academic Jeffrey Canton credits marketing, not story, and believes the origins of the phenomenon can be traced to the Land Down Under. “This whole notion of cross-marketing is really, in fact, an Australian notion. They’ve done it very successfully with a number of writers” (MacDonald 2005, 20). Of course, some English observers credit the Aussies with having introduced YA fiction to England in the first place. “In the UK, fiction for ‘young adults’ has grown hugely over the past decade,” Rachel Cooke wrote in 2003, “we got the idea from Australia”—and the United States, I would hasten to add (Cooke 2003).
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  Be that as it may, Australia does seem to have developed an extraordinary cadre of gifted, homegrown YA authors, whose work is often both cross-marketed and cross-published there. Brilliant writers like Markus Zusak, Margo Lanagan, and Sonya Harnett belong in this category, though all are published only as YA in the United States, where their work has regularly—and deservedly—received Printz Award recognition and attracted growing legions of adult readers.

  Nevertheless, a certain sense of stigma about being published as YA lingers, at least in the United States. Consider that Sittenfeld’s hugely successful first novel, Prep, was reportedly rejected by fourteen American publishers before Random House accepted it; “and at least half of them said no because they thought it was YA,” Sittenfeld told fellow author Margo Rabb. Rabb, whose own first novel, Cures for Heartbreak, was written for adults but published by Delacorte as YA, also had firsthand experience of this. When she told another writer at the MacDowell Colony, a prestigious writer’s retreat in New Hampshire, that her first novel was being published as young adult, the other’s response was a sniffy “Oh, God. That’s such a shame” (Rabb 2008, 23).

  The rampant confusion—in England, Australia, Canada, and America—over precisely what constitutes the difference between adult and YA has captured the attention of both the professional and the mass media and has made the crossover book one of the most buzzed about phenomena in today’s publishing world. Consider this sampling of articles that have appeared since 2002: