Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  Nevertheless, it is doubtful that many teens will be engaged by this particular “new” way of reading. According to a recent survey conducted by Teenreads.com, 46 percent of teens, when asked about “their affection for a digital reading device for fun reading (not schoolwork) if the price were affordable,” replied they preferred print books! While nearly one-quarter (24 percent) have read an e-book and 27 percent would like to, almost half (49 percent) said “they have no interest in reading e-books” (Fitzgerald 2009).

  However, even if the YA book, printed and published on paper, is in no immediate danger of obsolescence, the form and format in which its content is presented and its story told are already being reimagined, thanks to the influence of the Internet. One of the earlier examples of this was Paula Danziger and Ann Martin’s collaborative novel Snail Mail No More (Scholastic, 2000), which is told in the form of e-mail exchanges between best friends forever Elizabeth and Tara. As this suggests, authors were beginning as early as a decade ago to write books in the same way that teens themselves were writing online. Another example of this was Lauren Myracle’s ttyl (Abrams Amulet, 2004), the first novel to be told entirely in the form of instant messages. An instant success (John Green [2004]—who has gone on to fame and fortune as a YA novelist—said in his Booklist review, “Myracle cleverly manages to build rich characters and narrative tension without ever taking the story outside of an IM box”), the book has spawned two sequels: ttfn and 18r, g8r (Amulet, 2006 and 2007, respectively). In her novel Heart on My Sleeve (Simon & Schuster, 2004), the popular author Ellen Wittlinger also experimented with telling a novel in the form of traditional letters, e-mails, and instant messages, while in her earlier, Printz honor–winning Hard Love (Simon & Schuster, 1999), she had, of course, experimented with telling a novel in the form of excerpts from zines, handwritten poems, and letters. Similarly, Hillary Frank, in her novel I Can’t Tell You (Graphia, 2004), tells her story in notes and drawings exchanged among the various characters, a technique that I called “story as assemblage” in my Booklist review (Cart 2004, 232).

  Such assemblage also informed the construction of Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Year of Secret Assignments and its sequel The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie (Levine/Scholastic, 2004 and 2006, respectively). In these two novels, Moriarty employed multiple bits and pieces that ranged widely from letters, diary entries, lists, and quizzes to mock subpoenas, school assignments, and transcripts. Steve Kluger, in his more recent My Most Excellent Year (Penguin, 2008), employed a similar strategy (and received the first Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for his efforts), while Michael Spooner in Entr@pment: A High School Comedy in Chat (McElderry, 2009) wrote a novel almost entirely in the form of chats (interrupted by the occasional IM and blog entry).

  These hectic, occasionally frenetic, sometimes stream-of-consciousness techniques are not always successful in aesthetic terms, but they all manage to capture the interactive, often interrupted, discontinuous ways in which contemporary young adults experience daily life.

  Other online/digital activities—notably gaming—that occupy increasing portions of teens’ waking hours have also begun to impact not only the narrative styles but also the plots of YA novels. In fact, the librarian Kelly Czarnecki did an extended feature about this for Booklist. Published in concert with YALSA’s first-ever Teen Tech Week and titled “Books for Teen Gamers,” it appeared in the March 1, 2007, issue and suggested that librarians “may find that young adult readers and gamers have a lot to teach you about learning and literacy through play” (Czarnecki 2007, 78–79).

  Other novels, like Sean Stewart’s Cathy’s Book (Running Press Kids, 2006) and Patrick Carman’s Skeleton Creek (and its sequel Ghost in the Machine, both from Scholastic, 2009) have incorporated elements that lead readers to websites specially created to augment the experience of reading the book. This has led to the more ambitious multiplatform experiences that are presently in evolution. By far the two most ambitious of these are Scholastic’s 39 Clues and HarperTeen/Fourth Story Media’s the Amanda Project.

  The former is planned to consist of a projected ten-volume series of interrelated mysteries by such leading YA authors as Rick Riordan (who has plotted the story arc for the entire series and has written the first volume), Gordon Korman, Peter Lerangis, Jude Watson, Patrick Carman, and others. The premise is that the recently deceased matriarch of a prominent extended family, the Cahills, has left her survivors with a choice: each may accept either a bequest of $1 million or a clue. The first Cahill to assemble all thirty-nine clues, which are hidden all over the world, will, as Scholastic’s promotional materials promise, “discover what makes the family so powerful—a reward beyond measure.”

  The series’ interactive format involves reading the books, collecting game cards, playing “a fully immersive online gaming experience where players join the hunt for the 39 clues,” and competing for more than $100,000 in prizes.

  The latter project (Amanda) is aimed at seventh-grade readers and up, an older audience than Clues’ eight- to twelve-year-old target audience. Like Clues, though, it is also a multivolume, multiplatform experience. The first volume, invisible i, published in the fall of 2009 will be followed by seven additional titles. The premise of this series is that Amanda Valentino, an enigmatic new girl at Endeavor High, has gone missing, and three students she befriended must attempt to find her by following a trail of cryptic clues. A dedicated website invites readers to participate, too, by signing on as a member and then posting comments, creating new characters that might be added to future volumes, participating in the Debate Club, and submitting art and original writing for possible publication in a forthcoming zine; there will also, it is promised, be videos, music playlists, and games at the website.

  Though seemingly published for the retail market, libraries are purchasing both series (Clues publishes a library edition with a reinforced binding and without the game cards that are packaged with the retail edition). And teens are apparently welcoming such multiplatform experiences. A total of 56 percent of those who responded to the Teenreads.com survey mentioned previously said they would “like to see interactive online components and extras for books (e.g., website, YouTube videos, downloads) if they made sense with the content.”

  In a keynote address to the 2008 Ypulse Mashup, an annual event focusing on youth media, marketing, and technology, David Levithan, executive editorial director of Scholastic, stressed that “YA publishing needs to adapt to changes brought on by teens’ use of technology.” Publishers need to think of themselves as content providers,” he continued, “which means exploring new options, from developing multimedia publishing projects [like 39 Clues] to getting ready for digital books and mobile reading devices. The big question is ‘Can we go where teens live?’” (Pavo 2008).

  That’s exactly where YALSA intends to go, it seems, when it creates a new YA literature-focused blog with the mission of providing an online resource to teens for finding reading recommendations. It will also provide, YALSA promises, “a definitive web connection to blog posts, images, booklists, videos and more, all related to teen reading” (e-mail from Beth Yoke, YALSA executive director, September 15, 2009).

  Authors and publishers are also going where teens live. “The online world has become the place to build book buzz and have it reach fever pitch more quickly than ever,” according to Shannon Maughan (2007, 58), of Publishers Weekly. Among the major publishers, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin have been particularly active, all three now having teen networking sites that offer myriad opportunities for reader interaction, message boards, contests, book trailers, video interviews with favorite authors, author blogs, advance looks at forthcoming books (usually in exchange for a posted reaction or review), and more.

  Audiobooks

  The sixteenth-century Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo once said of reading that “it enables us to listen to the dead with our eyes.” Plus c’est ca change —today’s movement away from print is not onl
y toward the visual but also toward the oral, as more and more people read with their ears. Recorded books are hardly a new phenomenon, however. They date to the 1930s and the establishment of the Library of Congress’s program of recording for the blind, whereas Caedmon Records—the first to offer literature in the form of the spoken word—was founded in 1952. Nevertheless, most major publishers did not establish audio divisions until the mid-1980s; the Audio Publishers Association (APA) was founded in 1986, but it wasn’t until the early nineties that recorded books became a significant industry that has, since then, grown apace. By 2006, sales were estimated at $871 million, and audiobooks accounted for 10–15 percent of a book’s overall sales (Newman 2007).

  In 2004 when the National Endowment for the Arts released that controversial assessment showing a precipitous decline in American reading, it also showed a more than 30 percent increase in the number of people listening to books on tapes, CDs, and iPods (Harmon 2005, E1). This came as no great surprise to librarians, who already knew that, with an increase of 13.5 percent in the circulation of adult audiobooks and 10.7 percent in children’s, audio format materials were handily outpacing the overall circulation of materials. By 2008, 32 percent of all audiobook sales were to libraries (36 percent were to retailers; 16 percent, to wholesalers; 7 percent, direct to consumers; and 9 percent, to others). Seventeen percent of total sales were of audiobooks geared to children and teens, and the remaining 83 percent to adults. No surprise there—according to the APA, the majority of listeners are older than thirty. “They see audiobooks as a way to ‘read’ more while pursuing other lifestyle activities. The primary usage is while traveling and commuting.”4 Other activities while listening include exercising, relaxing, cooking, cleaning, gardening, crafting, walking the dog, and so on. In this sense, adults—like their teenage children—are becoming dedicated multitaskers.

  But, people inevitably ask, is listening to a text actually reading? The New York Times published an amusing article in 2007 about the hot debate over this issue then occurring in the growing ranks of America’s book discussion groups. Though the jury is still out, the reporter Andrew Adam Newman (2007) quoted one expert witness, Daniel T. Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive neuroscientist, thus: “If the goal is to appreciate the aesthetic of the writing and understand the story, then there won’t be much difference between listening and reading. The basic architecture of how we understand language is much more similar between reading and listening than it is different.”

  Pam Spencer Holley, a former president of YALSA and reviewer of audiobooks for Booklist, agrees: “The more I listen, the more ready I am to accept that listening can be interchanged with reading” (e-mail interview with Holley, December 6, 2009). When I asked her why audiobooks have become so popular with teens, she pointed to “the increase in the number of titles, which affords teens a wide range of selections from teen issues to vampires, werewolves and now angels. For pleasure or school assignments, listening is a natural for this teen population.”

  Indeed, more and more librarians are becoming—along with teachers— staunch advocates of the viability of listening as a literary experience. As a result, in 2006 YALSA and the Association for Library Service to Children jointly created a new annual prize for excellence in audiobook production. Called the Odyssey Award and sponsored by Booklist, it was first presented in 2008. Holley, one of the creators of the award, explains that it “gives recognition to the entire audiobook from ensuring that there are no distortions of sound, mispronunciations, or variations in sound quality to acknowledging the seamless partnership created by the best readers with their texts.”

  With this demonstration of increasing library interest, the producers of audio for children and teens have dramatically increased their output and, aided by technology, have also increased the number and variety of formats in which audiobooks are available.

  New ground in this connection was broken in 2008 by Brilliance Audio, one of the major producers of audio, when it released its audio version of John Green’s novel Paper Towns simultaneously with the print edition and in a record number of formats, including CD, MP3-CD, Playaway, and Audible and Overdrive downloadable options.

  “I have all these resources—a plethora of platforms—at my fingertips,” Brilliance vice president Tim Ditlow told Publishers Weekly, “and I can get listeners a book where they live and breathe” (Maughan 2008).

  With ever-better and more dramatic production values, audiobooks’ entertainment value has become a given. But what about their educational value? The creators of the Odyssey Award have an answer for this. “It’s important,” they write, “that we, as a group of professionals committed to lifelong literacy, recognize the role of audiobooks in the development of literacy.”

  In support of this stance, spokespersons cite an influential article coau-thored by Sharon Grover and Lizette D. Hannegan that appeared in Book Links in May 2005. Titled “Not Just for Listening,” the article discussed the growing integration of audiobooks into school curricula. “Educators,” Grover and Hannegan (2005, 16) write, “know that one of the most important reasons for the increasing interest in audiobooks for young people is the research demonstrating that listening to audiobooks fosters reading comprehension, fluency, language acquisition, vocabulary development, and improved achievement.”

  “Listening,” the Odyssey Award founders conclude, “is an important skill to be both taught and learned.” Their conclusion seems to prove that all old is new again! As long ago as 1985, the poet Donald Hall (who went on to serve as America’s poet laureate in 2006) wrote the essay “Bring Back the Out-Loud Culture” in Newsweek. In it, he noted that “before the late 1920s and 1930s American culture was out loud. We continually turned print into sound. Mother read or recited to infant (memorization allowed entertainment even while both hands made bread). Grandfather read from Prophet and Gospel; his grandson performed chapters from Scott and Dickens…. When we stopped memorizing and reciting literature, our ability to read started its famous decline” (Hall 1985, 12). As children speak poems and stories aloud,” he continued, “by the pitch and muscle of their voices they will discover drama, humor, passion and intelligence in print. In order to become a nation of readers, we need again to become a nation of reciters.”

  And the French educator and author Daniel Pennac wrote compellingly in his book Better Than Life about his success, through reading aloud to them, in instilling a love of reading in his formerly book-hating students.

  The nationally known reading expert Kylene Beers (1998, 31) saw further evidence of this in practice, as she reported on her field research in the article “Listen While You Read”: “Soon I began to understand how certain students were able to connect to reading through listening.” She offers this telling excerpt from one of her conversations with a teacher:

  Teacher: Listening to the English language is one of the best ways to improve their [students’] vocabulary, their usage, and their comprehension. Just reading books doesn’t help these kids very much. They need to hear the language. So I put them with books on tape.

  Beers: Are you seeing that listening to the books improves their reading interest?

  Teacher: Sure. More important, because these kids have to pass tests, listening to books helps their comprehension.

  Grover and Hannegan (2005, 16) concur, writing, “Many instructional standards, especially in English and language arts, refer to listening skills students need in order to be successful readers.” They then offer an extensive annotated bibliography of books on tape that “have strong connections to classroom and instructional use.”

  Let ALA’s Odyssey Award founders have the penultimate word here: “Children of this century live in a world where media is a dominant form of communication, and imagination’s greatest champion in this technological realm is the spoken word. Through the years our cultures have been nurtured and our customs passed on by storytellers—audiobooks carry on that tradition.”5 To which Holley adds:
“All of us who read form images in our minds of what we’ve read; the same thing occurs while listening. So I think that for most purposes listening to a book is using one’s ears and imagination while reading is using one’s eyes and imagination.”

  To which one can only add a hearty, “Hear, hear!”

  If You Are Here, Where Is There?

  Surely, it’s obvious by now that story, in whatever form or format it may be presented, will survive. But so, I predict, will paper. Ease of access offered by technology is one thing; the aesthetic pleasure of the book as a physical object, as an artifact, is quite another, however. Nothing in my experience can beat the tactile and visual pleasure of holding, examining, and reading a beautifully designed, bound, and printed book. By comparison, the act of reading a book on a screen is a cold, sterile, and eyestrain-inducing exercise. And I suspect that enough other people share my sympathies to ensure that the book, as a physical object, will be around for a while, quite a while. What is interesting, even exciting, in this context, though, is the perhaps unintended impact that the omnipresence of the digital in the lives of today’s young netizens is having on the design of books. More and more publishers, it seems, are finding the future in the past, as books begin to replicate the visual appeal of illustrated books from the nineteenth century.6

  The best case in point at the moment of the new-old aesthetic importance of books for young readers may be Scott Westerfeld’s new novel Leviathan (Simon Pulse, 2009), a book that—though aimed at young adults—is lavishly illustrated and features beautifully intricate, full-color endpaper maps. It’s also printed on seventy-pound paper, the whole point of the obviously expensive exercise being Westerfeld’s desire to re-create the look of Victorian books, as his novel itself is a work of steampunk science fiction (though set during an alternate World War I instead of the more customary Victorian era). Happily, Westerfeld has the best-selling clout with his publisher to make such an expensive publishing event happen (even if he did, as one reads, have to pay for a large part of it himself). Another recent case in point is Chris Wooding’s Malice, a shiver-inducing story that combines traditional text-driven narrative with comic book elements. At the same time, its three-dimensional cover— while giving librarians fits—reminds us that reading is not only an intellectual but also a tactile experience!