Young Adult Literature and the Contemporary World

The Future of YAL

The Age of the Non-Reader Turned Reader

By Janine L. Collins

There are so many things going on in the world today that it may seem difficult to stay abreast of them all. However the young adult literature (YAL) that I have read over the course of this semester provides a way to keep young adults, their parents, teachers, and other interested and well meaning individuals in the loop. Two of the themes that I see strongly represented in the young adult novels Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography, Nat Turner: Revolution Volume 2, What They Found: Love On 145^th Street, The Wednesday Wars, and Life As We Knew It, are injustice and change.

Injustice, whether personally experienced or viewed on a local or global scale exists in many forms. For example, we live in the 21^st century yet the effects of slavery, racism, and the injustices they have produced are still experienced by many young adults today. Change, whether environmental, situational, physical, or emotional is a reality (and sometimes a harsh one) in the lives of young adults. These five novels and others of the day depict how these two issues affected the lives of young adults from the past and those in the present. The novels deal with these issues from the perspective of young adults but in writing styles that appeal to adults as well.

The injustices faced by children of the past, such as inattentive parents due to the pressures of jobs and careers were also prevalent in the 1960s. In Gary D. Schmidt’s novel, “The Wednesday Wars” the central character has to learn how to deal with the stressors in his life on his own. His family is too busy with maintaining an image, or in the case of his sister being a free spirit to help him cope. His father is too wrapped up in the family business, keeping up with the Joneses, having the perfect house, and the perfect family which consists of the wife and two kids in suburbia. His mother, as it is alluded to, is so stressed with the cares of maintaining this image that she hides the fact that she smokes from a family to which it is obvious. She doesn’t speak up when she disagrees with the father and just blends into the background of the perfect picture. Children today experience these same issues. Often they are left alone because parents are working late or too busy with the cares of life to attend to them. Some parents are not home until many hours after the child comes home from school. Family time that would be spent at the dinner table is a rarity these days. Yet it is so important to the emotional and social health of children that it sparked the “Family Table Campaign.”

In the graphic novels “Malcolm X” by Andrew Helfer, “Nat Turner” by Kyle Baker, and “The Wall: Growing up Behind the Iron Curtain” by Peter Sis we see individuals from the past fighting against the injustices of their day. We also see the characters in Walter Dean Myers novel, “What They Found: Love On 145^th Street”, which is based on life today, striving to overcome the effects of these same injustices.

As I said, we all experience change in some form. In the past adults have viewed the lives of children as being stress free- no matter what the social class. Any change children had to experience was often met with an instruction to “Get over it”, “Don’t worry about”, “Just accept it”, or “Just do it.” As we see in today’s literature children have just as many stressors in their lives as adults. The stressors may be minor to us, such as, being stood up at the prom as Nick was in “Probably Still Nick Swansen”; thinking your new teacher hates you, or being better at basketball than your boyfriend. However, these are major issues in the life of a child. Today’s novels also deal with issues that we would love to shelter children from, such as racism, global warming, date rape, and murder, and the death of a primary caregiver. Today’s novels deal with issues from the past and the present. Some of the topics are strong and in-your-face. Yet teens are drawn to these novels because they deal with issues that are significant to them.

The novels in YAL relay the message to teens that they are not alone, and that there is no problem to large or tragic for which there is no resolution. Teens are also shown through these novels that someone cares. Not only by the characters that play this out, but also by the teachers that place the novels in their hands. This opens the door to trust because a level of compassion is shown when you place a worthy book in the hands of the target reader.

As Mallory mentioned in her essay, the genre is growing. We see so many new genres within YAL. The fiction and non-fiction of my day (early 1970s through the early 1980s), has evolved into realistic fiction, science fiction or fantasy, historical fiction, graphic novels, self-help, and how-to books. Today’s literature is suited for a variety of readers and not just the voracious and advanced sort. We see this in the graphic novels of Malcolm X, Nat Turner, and “American Born Chinese” to name a few. In these novels the mixture of text and graphics has an appeal to both mature, well-read individuals, such as me, as well as younger and apprehensive readers. To test the appeal of these graphic novels I took them to a 6^th grade reading class for low-level readers. They loved them! They wanted more time to look them over. It seemed to encourage them that a teacher would think “comic books” were acceptable reading material. In the past these books had been thought of as being of no benefit to children. I think back to the days of the Archie Comics that I used to read. My teachers didn’t think of these as educational material, and were viewed more as leisure reading material of no significance. However we see through today’s graphic novels that the material and drawings have not only become more complex, they have also been incorporated into school curriculums. This should be viewed as a positive because the education focus of late is to ‘do whatever you can to get kids reading.’

The age of the non-reader is declining with recent trends in YAL. Not only are non-readers finding subject matter that hits home, but the different formats that these novels take appeal to these apprehensive readers as well as the advanced readers. The issues that young adults face are not bound by time. We see this in “Make Lemonade” and “Story of a Girl”, and in “Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes” and “Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature”.

The Future looks bright for YAL, the children who will read it and the adults who present it to them. My hope is that this literature will help young adults cope with the issues of today so that they can be productive members of the global society.