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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Girls Only! YA Freakout (Again)
Posted by on Wed, Apr 30 at 12:08 PM
When you allow two unapologetic young adult-fiction lovers like Courtney and myself to share an office, it’s just sort of inevitable that our workdays occasionally devolve into conversations like this one:
Courtney: Oh my god, do you remember My Sweet Audrina? That VC Andrews one-off?Alison: God, yes. Everything I knew about sex as a 10-year-old, I learned from VC Andrews. Those books make such a good case for early childhood sex education.
Courtney: So you don’t get all traumatized after reading them and then start thinking your dad or your brother is after you.
The impetus for this conversation was the single best book blog EVER which I can’t believe I only just found out about: Jezebel’s Friday Fine Lines feature, in which bloggers take a “a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.” The Westing Game! Jacob Have I Loved! (That review’s opener: “Let’s all just start crying now.”) Weetzie Bat! (Attribute this to my youth if you will, I loved that book. And the review’s headline, “The Book for Girls who Ended Up Taking a Gay Dude to Prom,” is, um, insightful.)
Here’s a question for any librarians in the audience: A lot of the books I loved as a kid were written in the ’60s and ’70s, stuff by Paul Zindel, Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, etc, so by the time I got my hands on them they’d already been out for years. Are kids today still reading these authors? The library doesn’t even have a copy of Paul Zindel’s amazing The Pigman (according to the website, anyway), and they’ve only got four copies of The Chocolate War (though a bunch more are on order, I noticed)… Just wonderin’.
And while we’re on the subject, this might just be the best powells.com book synopsis ever.
Comments
oh god the westing game. I LOVED turtle.
I loved the VC Andrews books, especially the ones about the hillbilly girl who did it with her Dad.
And you could buy them at Safeway.
scott westerfeld wrote the uglies books, all of his books are REALLY good especially "so yesterday". i really enjoyed that. sort of a YA "pattern recognition".
The Mercury should do a YA column like fine lines! Alison, will you and Courtney please do this?
I myself only found Fine Lines a few weeks ago, and it inspired me to look up and devour all the Madeleine L'Engle books I could get from the library. And Katherine Paterson, and Cynthia Voigt, and Judy Blume, etc. I'm realizing that so many of my closely-held beliefs can be traced back to these books.
It seems like every woman I talk to between the age of 25-30 loved those books, and I also have the impression that 'the younger generation' has not retained this love -- but is that just my addled old brain imagining things?
None of those aforementioned authors get read to any great degree. They do get checked out, and of course, receive recommendations from the librarians who once read these books as a child. One reason I think is the design of these books becomes dated rather quickly, and an ugly book jacket makes a tough sell to a teen or kid. Too, the canon for YA books just isn't well-developed yet. The writers you mentioned were amongst the first to write specifically for a teen audience. Few books end up being so universally relevant from generation to generation, even ones we consider great. If you look at children's literature the canon is much larger, though some of that is falling away. The Oz books though still read aren't as popular as they were in the 70's. All this said, everyone should be happy to know that the options for YA books are growing and there is even greater diversity in themes. Teens today have many more choices, and many of them are as good as what was written in the past, if not better.
la foi, that's an excellent idea, and Courtney and I just got really excited about it. We're thinking bi-weekly, book club style... we'll kick it off in a week or so with the Westing Game. Any other suggestions?
Blogtownies should also read The Westing Game so we can have a book club forum. Who's in? Also on the docket: The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder! So stoked.
Huge V.C. Andrews fan when I was in elementary school - I remember my mom taking me to B.Dalton's to buy "There Will Be Thorns" when it came out and the clerk was shocked and appalled that my mom was buying the book for her 11 year-old daughter not herself. My mom had no idea what they were about - so we bought it, but then she read it first and we had to "have a talk" before she'd give it to me.
Of course since that's the third book in the series I was already warped.
Does anybody (mike?) have any suggestions of newer stuff that's worth reading? I love the nostalgia trip as much as anybody, don't get me wrong, but I'm curious about what the kids are reading these days.
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I'm totally on the same page. I LOVED the Dangerous Angels books although I didn't read them until college.
But I still love YA fiction like His Dark Materials, Harry Potter and I just finished this great series called Uglies. I think they're already started on a movie for it.
As for VC Andrews she just made me mad, even as a kid. (I can't believe that the "Flowers" kids didn't turn in their evil mother...)