200+ Pages!
OK, I’ve run NOTs on picture books and chapter books up the flagpole, it’s time to move on to Young Adult Fiction. What did you like? Or what did you hate?
Even before J.K. Rowling went batty, I was underwhelmed by Harry Potter books. I liked the first one or two, but as the series progressed they seemed increasingly self indulgent. She seemed fixated on filling in backstories for reasons that never made sense. Why did Dumbledore think it was so important for Harry to watch the history of Voldemort, his parents, and Snape unfold via the Pensieve? Why not just tell him the five minute version? Was Harry some kind of imbecile? Maybe the appeal was lost on me because I read them as an adult.
A Catcher in the Rye was another one that left me cold. I read it when I was a YA and found myself wondering what the deal was. Some jerky prep school kid doesn’t feel like he fits in… I’m a little sorry for him, but not a lot.
To Kill a Mockingbird, though, was great. I guess technically it’s not purely YAF, but most people are YAs when they read it. Same thing for The Red Badge of Courage. I remember being puzzled at first why things were so cloudy for the narrator, but when it snapped that it was representing how confusing things were in a battle, I felt like I had really learned something.
What YAF Rates With You?
So share with us, Deadsplinteroos — Judy Blume, yes or no? Hunger Games? Little Women? What did you like and what was a stinker when you were a kid? Or if you’re like me and you still dip a toe in those waters, what do you like as an adult? There’s a lot to be said for the genre, but not every author can justify more than the first 200 pages of their five book contract. What do you think?
Yes to Blume.
Hell fucking no to Sparkle Vampire Groomer Creepy Old Stalker fanfic Twilight. I also realize that I am not the target audience.
The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix is one of my favorite series to this day. Especially the second book and dealing with loneliness, etc, wow those were good.
young adult fiction?
i dont know any of that shit… barely literate me
so what….we talking pg 13 here?
i reccomend larry nivens the state series
unrelated….but i am watching reality z
and this is now my favourite song evar
I didn’t read much YA growing up, I don’t really think it was a thing. Or I didn’t know about it. I used to read whatever books my daughter read though. I like the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials series. And anything by Diana Wynn’s Jones, especially Dogsbody and Howls Moving Castle. It was hard not to get involved in the Harry Potter books when she was in elementary and middle school. They were huge. I took her and her friends to the movies and the midnight book release events. But I agree that the books became more and more pretentious as Rowling’s self importance grew.
Oh good. I thought it was just me ( not remembering any YA books).
Is Playboy or Hustler letters “Young Adult Fiction”? Asking for a friend.
Wasn’t it Penthouse where they had “Letters” that started with “I never thought it would happen to me”? When I was growing up we, my siblings and friends and I, had this game, I don’t know who started it, where you’d try to introduce that prefatory line and see if you could get away with it.
So, for example, in my case, I once said in front of my siblings and to my mother, “I never thought this would happen to me, but I hit a bump on [X Road] on my bike and now I think the front tire…”
One of my friends said in front of one of our most forbidding teachers, a former Catholic nun no less, while delivering an oral report on Summer of My German Soldier, speaking of terrible YA fiction, “I never thought this would happen to me, but I think I know what…” He got major points from us. I can’t remember what grade he got from Ms. (as she was known, controversially at the time, since the female teachers were usually all Miss or Mrs.) [x].
I was really into L.J. Smith’s Night World Series. Vampire Diaries was meh and then I found out her publishers did her dirty and basically stole the series from her and had them ghost written.
RL Stein’s Fear Street books were my jam.
Ender’s Game blew my mind but the series got weird.
VC Andrews’ books were all kinds of fucked up (always included the sexual awakening of a young female protagonist but with a taboo partner… generally a much older man) and I couldn’t get enough.
I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy in five parts many times in my young adulthood. I even have the original radio show on CD. As with many books, I’m not sure if it counts as YA other than me reading it while I was a teen.
I enjoyed Ender’s Game, but yeah I agree it got weird to the point I didn’t read after the 2nd book.
Also Card spent a little too much time focused on soaping young male bodies in the first book which was ick (and I didn’t notice till someone pointed it out, much like the homo eroticism of Top Gun) that now I can’t unsee it.
I initially thought the idea of young military geniuses was great because I was young and believed I could be that genius however, you see what an actual war does to adults with much more life and military experience and knowledge then you know Card’s premise of young Napoleans and Sun Tzus was full of shit and ultimately stupid even if the kid is a blood thirsty genius.
To assume older folk aren’t blood thirsty enough never met someone like Mark Clark, Douglas Haig or Donald Trump
From what I remember, Ender was thoroughly traumatized by the xenocide he committed (unawares). So he goes on some boring ass spiritual quest to atone for his sins and fixates on a girl/woman or something. Then is given a second chance to protect an alien species. His siblings and Bean had their own story arcs.
I’m all for homoeroticism but not through a pedophilic lense…is the latter what you’re implying? I totally didn’t notice either when I read it but I was young.
Yeah, the pedo overtones. The homoerotica not so much.
Also I read it when I was in my early teens so I didn’t notice either.
The journey was supposed to be an attempt at atonement, but I didn’t like for the pretty much the same reasons you did.
If I remember, the girl he was fixated on was his sister.
My favorite young adult book was Jazz Country by Nat Hentoff. He was one of the great music writers and reviewers of the post-war period and wrote only one YA novel as far as I know. It changed me in a lot of ways and cemented what has been a lifelong love of jazz music. A librarian suggested it for me based on the records I was listening to at the library’s listening rooms.
I have mentioned before that because of my mother’s voracious reading habits and my parents’ habit of flea-marketing and leaving all sorts of inappropriate books, scooped up the armful for pennies on the dollar, lying around, that I questioned my 6th grade teacher’s taste in reading materials when she assigned us Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is nothing more than a collection of Stuart Smalley-like aphorisms packaged to appeal to an early-1970s middlebrow, middle class audience.
When I got to high school I was tracked into the first level, which meant “definitely college bound,” and there we read one Shakespeare play and one Dickens novel (among many other things) every year, until in my senior year we got to AP English, where we read one novel a week. Imagine that, but there was no Internet then.
Anyway, when I was in 10th grade we were assigned to go to the school or public library and pick out a book that was written in the 1800s, so in reprint obviously, and deliver an oral report on the author and the work we’d read. That poor teacher, I still remember her, and the look on her face when from my overpacked home library I decided to discuss Oscar Wilde and his The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Oh yes, Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas came up, because along with this flea-market-procured copy of Reading Gaol came a reader’s guide that offered all sorts of insights.
Then came the phone call, there were usually two or three from the school every year regarding me, and much to my surprise my father handled this one. So he, who did not even go to an academic high school, he had some kind of technical school/WWII-service union credentials, joined my teacher and I to discuss The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
My teacher’s point was that not all reading material is really appropriate for all age groups. My father’s response, and I’m paraphrasing, was something like, “Did he understand it and explain it, like you asked him to?”
“Yes, as far as I know, but I’ve never read it myself because it’s considered…”
“So my boy is smarter than you are and my property taxes are paying you–”
I forget how the rest of it went but it went downhill but I got an A for the class.
A teacher unhappy about any kid actually reading something from the 1800s???
Have you ever read The Ballad of Reading Gaol, first of all, but second of all there was a time when decent suburban public high schools tracked kids according to a meritocracy into what is now college-level Humanities courses. This wasn’t uncommon. My peers all chose their books (or poem, in my case) unthinkingly, because that’s what we were told to do. Plus I just missed the deadline. Wilde was imprisoned and possibly going mad in the very late 1800s.
Now, even if I were to send a son of mine into a private school, because no child of mine would ever attend one of the public schools here, even the exam schools now operate under some kind of lottery system because of “equity,” he’d have to go on about Oscar Wilde’s queer-intersectionality with British colonialism of Ireland and white patriarchy and God knows what else.
…I don’t think the “YA” tag had been coined when I was young enough for it to apply but I’d put a good word in for the likes of robert westall’s futuretrack5…pretty good bit of dystopian reality of apparently utopian future
…or the really pretty dark stuff like robert cormier’s stuff…the chocolate war…I am the cheese…the bumblebee flies anyway
…there were others I came across before I got to things like iain banks’ wasp factory but I think maybe YA fiction has been pulling some punches since it became a category with an acronym?
Yes! I’ve read some recent YA and can’t remember the titles. They are all so PG. I feel like they don’t give teens enough credit or want to shield them from everything…or possibly strive not to get banned by schools. Either way they feel lightweight. Then again, I’m far from YA’s target market.