Got busy writing today – will post tomorrow 🙂
A Rose by Any Other Name…
What makes Young Adult young adult? It seems to me that frequently, authors consider their work to be Young Adult if it is about young adults. The content is not considered. I think that agents try to steer authors toward “adult” if their stories seem unmarketably dark, but by and large, plenty of what I’ve seen in the YA section at the bookstore seems a little mature for many YA readers.
To get a better understanding of the characteristics of “Young Adult Literature,” I looked on the American Library Association website http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/profdev/whitepapers/yalit.cfmand found it to be highly informative. Discussed were the definition, the history, the growth of author interest in the genre, and the expanding readership. I recommend it.
The most interesting fact for me, however, was that when the term first came to broad use in the 1960s, “young adult” readers ranged in age from twelve to eighteen years old (a.k.a. adolescence). By the late 1990’s, the readership had expanded to include children from ten to twenty-five years old. I say “children,” because this coincides with an interesting fact from my college Child Psychology class (circa 1998) that adolescence is now considered to last until age twenty-nine. (The “end” being when one has established a financial and home life independent of one’s parents.)
There is talk in publishing circles that the term YA is too broad, and should be broken into “younger YA” (ages ten to fourteen) and “older YA” (age fifteen and up. This makes a lot of sense, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the different developmental interests of those two groups. But if they’re going to go that far, perhaps they should create a third sub-genre for the college crowd.
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You Can’t Tell a Book by Its Cover
Am I the only one who is mad at libraries for getting rid of their “old” books? School libraries are some of the worst offenders, regularly cancelling them and even throwing them away if no one takes them.
Some of the best books from my young adult years were hand-me-downs from my grandparents, parents and older siblings. When I did go to the library, I saw past the plain covers and creamy pages of the older books. Although I borrowed plenty of novels by Lois Duncan and Judy Blume (which are probably also considered old by today’s standards!), my favorites were Polly Kent Rides West in the Days of ’49 and The Wagon to the Star.
Old books are like snapshots in time, glimpses of the way things used to be. They should be treasured for their capacity to (accurately) whisk one off to eras and places long gone. Through them we can experience history for ourselves, “hear” how people spoke, “see” the clothes they wore and learn about the places they lived. Old books acquaint us with the values of the past and provide continuity with the present when we recognize those same attitudes in ourselves.
Although some popular classics remain on the shelves, their age disguised by updated jackets, many of the best ones are gone. Library copies of Betty Cavanna, Beverly Butler and Elizabeth George Speare books are purchased at sales or retired to land fills. I have spoken about this with librarians, who respond that kids today don’t want to read the older books, but I suspect that the librarians are really the guilty ones. If they had read them, they would be spending their time trying to get the students to check them out, not putting them on a cart in the hall.
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Considering Asynchronous Development in Book Selection
Asynchronous Development: Mental and physical maturation that occurs at different rates, the mental capacity (in the case of Gifted/Talented children) distinctly outpacing the chronological/emotional age. An example of this would be a fifth grader doing tenth grade reading.
When I was in second grade, my family was packing everything we owned into boxes because we were moving to a different state. One morning, wearing my yellow pajamas with the feet, I went into my father’s study to ask him a question. He wasn’t there, but I knew he’d be back and sat down to wait. Although most of his books had already been packed, there were still a few stacked up on the table next to me. Bored, I picked one up. It was interestingly small, with a blue linen cover. I opened it and proceeded to read a story about a man who stayed overnight in a haunted house to prove that ghosts were a myth. After watching a child’s footprint form in the dust and enduring other equally terrifying incidents, he realized that ghosts weren’t a myth at all.
So did I! I understood every word perfectly, but was it appropriate for a second grader to be reading Edgar Allen Poe?
Similarly, should a nine-year-old be required to read a disturbing story involving a boy who bleeds to death after falling on an axe? Many gifted/talented teachers commonly select books for the classroom that were never intended to be read by children of the ages they teach, in an effort to provide a challenging read with appropriately complex vocabulary. Emotional age is rarely considered in the selection process. As a result, students are regularly exposed to content that is developmentally inappropriate and/or psychologically disturbing.
Where the Red Fern Grows is a classic, and if an eighth grader picks it up, he’ll have a thought provoking read. A gifted fourth grader, however, is more likely to have nightmares and develop a mysterious aversion to axes.
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