The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit

New York Times ^ | April 1, 2010 | Julie Just

[discostu]

LOTR and Watership Down didn’t make their writers royalty rich. They were successful books, and over the long haul might be more successful than Potter, but over the short term, which is really what publishers are thinking about, they’ve got nothing on Potter, or it’s “predecessor” Goosebumps, or “successor” Twilight. These books series are licenses to print money.

It’s not just a matter of the books being “about children”, you can make a protagonist any age you like, it’s a matter of the books being about children that other children can understand. Children facing children problems. Trying to find their place in the world, dealing with being “different”, not feeling their parents understand them or are fair. It’s not the strength of the reader or the language, it’s the CONTENT being within the kids world view. LOTR is a brilliant book, and has great lessons for kids, but there really aren’t kid issues. Same with Watership Down. I read all those when I was tween age, but there was no identifying with them, nobody in those books was me. And that’s what’s driving the current push, authors have finally figured out how to put in characters that kid/ YA reader can not just like but UNDERSTAND.

[Fiji Hill]

I didn’t touch YA books unless I had too with a ten foot pole (We had these points we had to earn for reading books and taking tests and so I’m sure I read some). I couldn’t stand them. Books like Andersonville and Dune series were my playground in middle school and High School.

I felt the same way. When I was in high school, I read only one YA novel, Don Robertson's The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (Fawcett, 1967), and it was a pretty good read. My favorite authors included Martin Caidin and Robert Leckie, who wrote non-fiction books on military topics.

Among I also read on my own at the age of 16 were General Claire L. Chennault's autobiography Way of a Fighter (G. P. Putnam's, 1949), Hector C. Bywater's fictional The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), and Up Ship! by Charles E. Rosendahl (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), a book about airships, copies of which are now worth beaucoup bucks.

[Crolis]

Thanks for the link! My wife teaches 5th grade and many of the books she has chosen from our approved list also appear on this 1000 books list. I’ll have to show her this tonight.