The Wide World of YA Lit

What am I learning about Young Adult Literature?

Perhaps that during all those years I wanted to prove to people how intelligent I was by reading classic literature, I missed a lot of gems. Of course, I read a good deal of YA lit, good as well as bad, but I always felt a sort of shame in getting books from the "kid" section of the library. I shouldn't have.

Although I moved almost entirely away from YA books by the time I was fourteen, now, in this brief revisiting, I am reminded vividly of how mixed I was, how mixed up everyone was, in middle school. That was when I most needed these "young adult" books--these finding yourself stories marketed for teenagers. For when I was in sixth grade and I heard one girl call another one a "fat whore" in the locker room. For when my friends and I were testing out the limits of our profane vocabularies amongst ourselves, for when we were discussing shaving our legs for the first times.

Young Adult Lit may be a marketing tool for books, and maybe that's okay. Because these books have an audience, and need all the marketing help they can get to find it. I think I am realizing how much of who I am was established when I was in middle school (although I know many girls still read YA lit into high school and it serves them well). But reading about a wider world probably encouraged me to seek such a place--theoretically, it makes sense that it would.

The best YA books seem to be stories that had to be told, and just happen to be happening to young people. That's how I felt when I read Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You for the first time, or Francesca Lia Block's books, or even Tamora Pierce's Alanna fantasy novels. They were about teenage pregnancy, AIDS, knighthood, but they were valid, they were reassuring. They were about important stories to me, as much as the Odyssey was an important story, or Romeo and Juliet. I think the idea that people read books for reassurance that they are not alone is true of all literature, but most especially of YA lit.

It's so important, when you're thirteen and confused as all get out about everything in the world, to read something that validates how "not alone" you are. To empathize with a character, to see an internal journey that belongs to someone else, yet is not so far removed from your own. This is not to say that children's books, or adult books, or "classics" can't fill this void--they absolutely can. But it is to validate YA lit, and the specific purpose it serves. It can be so easy to trivialize "kid" things, to look down on transitions one has already made. But the best writers of YA lit seem to eternally live within those transitions, and simultaneously reassure that yes, you can make it through to the other side.