I've noticed lately that a lot of adults are reading YA fiction, much of it of the fantasy variety. But I picked up a book this past Saturday at the Dollar Store that has me looking at YA with fresh eyes. Here's a portion of the text that was used on the cover.
"That was too much. That was the last straw. I simply could not be doing this: driving like a maniac, losing my mind, swerving through traffic with blood on my hands.
But I was. That was the thing. I was."
I read that and thought, wow, this might be a good noir novel. Then I flipped open the back cover to read about the author and discovered that he wrote young adult novels. I bought the book anyway, just out of curiosity. And yeah, it was noir right straight through to the ending. The author didn't cop out with a happily ever after.
This was not the YA of my youth, or even my sons. Things seem to be changing. Or was this just a fluke that I happened to find? Have any of you been surprised with the YA you might be reading?
Oh yeah, the book was "Paranoid Park" by Blake Nelson.
8 comments:
I don't really get the category YA. But 12, I was reading adult books and so were my kids. What age is YA meant for. If it's 8-12 then I'd say that was too intense of a book. If 12 and over, why aren't they reading adult books? I guess they want to read books about teenagers. That's the only thing I see possibly separating the two. But LOVELY BONES was about a teenager and that's not YA.
So was I, Patti, anything I could get my hands on, in fact. I believe YA is supposed to be for 12 to 18 year olds. And yes, I believe they want to read about people their own age and how they deal with life. But maybe they're just basically for school libraries where they wouldn't be able to put adult fiction.
Librarians have been debating this trend in YA for some time now. Some think it's good to see YA get real, but others decry the relentless darkness. (I fearlessly take a fence-sitting position myself.)
Hard to know where to stand on this, Al. This book in particular doesn't really have the good vs bad resolution that I remember. In fact, he actually gets away with the crime he committed as the book show how he deals with what happened and how he manages to live with himself afterward.
Paranoid Park has been made into an awesome movie by Gus Van Sant: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0842929/
The popularity of YA with adults I find is a very complex and interesting questions. As I can understand why people read Harry Potter (easy, straightforward and fulfills fantasies), there is another side to YA that seems to be written by adults with issues for adults with issues. Those readers are extremely defensive and argue that such literature is NECESSARY for youth and not for them. I doubt that, but that's another issue.
Yes, Ben, I understand the lure of Harry Potter. I hadn't thought about readers working through their childhood problems by reading YA though. There's plenty of adult books that deal with the same topics. A writer using it to work through their past, I can understand.
At a recent trip to my library, the head librarian, who we know a bit, was terrifically upset with many of the YA books. So many about vampires, and bullies and drugs and cliques. They are either didactic or weird (her words). No one is writing literary books for YAs, I guess. That is what she was saying.
Or maybe none of the publishing houses are buying them. If they don't believe young readers will read them, they're not likely to publish them.
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