A History of Young Adult Literature

Recently, we enjoyed reading a chronology of young adult literature by CNN's Ashley Strickland that was full of both facts and insights. Some highlights:

Photo: (Duncan) via Flickr, modified

• 16- to 29-year-olds check out more books from libraries than any other age group.

• The first book considered to be written specifically for teenagers, Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly, hit the shelves in 1942.

• In the early days, most books for young adults centered around two themes: sports (for boys) and romance (for girls). This changed in 1967 with S. E. Hinton’s gritty classic The Outsiders, which provided teens with a less rosy, more dramatic and realistic story.

• Through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, most books for adolescents covered the joys and pains of adolescence (romance, heartbreak, divorce, drug abuse, fitting in, being misunderstood, finding one’s place) in similar ways. All that changed when Harry Potter flew onto the scene in 1997, opening the door for more fantasy like the Twilight series. 

This seems to be the era of dystopian novels. Lois Lowry’s The Giver is probably the best-known early offering in this genre, though it came out in 1993 and didn't inspire too many imitators – at least, not right away. Now, however, series like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, and Uglies are flying off the shelves. What is it about this style that young people find so appealing? Perhaps it’s the genre’s ability to blend the fantastic with the realistic. CNN's Strickland postulates that young people prefer books that feel “real,” and dystopian novels can capture the imagination while still presenting characters and situations that feel relatable.

The article also states that theme of transformation and change will always be a hallmark of successful young adult books because it reflects the issues teens confront in their own lives. Young people, it seems, can find comfort in the chronicles of characters also struggling to navigate their changing landscapes. Despite the dark themes in many young adult books, nearly all of the heroes emerge victorious in the end, if somewhat battle-scarred by their journeys. These triumphs, perhaps, give young people confidence that they, too, can be successful.

We’re thrilled that teenagers have so many appealing books to choose from. We’re also happy that so many of them star bold, admirable female heroes. In fact, though there are certainly plenty of new books more likely to appeal only to girls or to boys, an increasing number of novels seem to be equally popular with both genders. We love this unifying trend in literature – the line between men and women’s roles in our culture is becoming increasingly blurred, and it seems appropriate that books are echoing this drift.

Engaging adolescents with compelling young adult literature is a wonderful way to cultivate a love of reading that will last into adulthood. And studies show that reading widely and frequently improves vocabulary, builds background knowledge, enhances empathy, and exercises higher thinking skills. There has never been a better time to be a reading teen!

Recommended Reads: A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

We pick up our Recommended Reads series, which reviews books or series written for children or young adults, with Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, a mystery based upon real-life events. 

Grades: 7 – 10; may be of more interest to young women

Awards: Carnegie Medal (United Kingdom), Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Borders Original Voices Award, Printz Award Runner Up

Adult Themes: A few references to sexuality and some intermittent cursing, all relatively mild – our heroine is a good Victorian-era girl.

Plot: The summer of 1906 presents Mattie Gokey with a great deal of uncertainty. On one hand, she wants nothing more than to attend Barnard College and use her considerable talents to write stories and books. On the other hand, she’s tied to her father’s farm in upstate New York, where she must help him with the work and care for her younger sisters after her mother’s death. To complicate matters, handsome Royal Loomis has started courting her, and though he seems wrong for her in many ways, she’s tickled by his attention. Marrying him is an attractive prospect, but it would mean forgoing Barnard. And Mattie is horrified by the grinding responsibilities her friend Minnie endures as the young mother of infant twins who must also cook and clean for her husband and his hired workers. The prospect of domestic life is bleak. On the other hand, her reading, coupled with her relationship with her subversive teacher, lead her to wonder whether being a female author is much more attractive than the being a housewife on a farm. When Mattie takes a job at a nearby summer resort to help her father buy a mule, a guest named Grace hands Mattie a packet of letters and tells her to burn them. Hours later, Grace’s lifeless body is retrieved from the lake. In combing through Grace’s letters, Mattie strives to discover whether Grace’s death was an accident or something more sinister, and draws some important conclusions about her own life in the process.

Our Take: (Warning: Includes spoilers!) One of the most fascinating facts about this book is that the murder around which its plot revolves actually took place. Grace’s letters were found in her murderer’s room, not placed into the hands of a sixteen-year-old hotel employee, but Donnelly has lifted the case’s facts and names from the same historical events that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. This book is a gem even without that background knowledge, however (we confess that we did not know it until reaching the Epilogue). Mattie is a thoroughly admirable heroine: intelligent, motivated, talented, and loving, but still flawed enough to be relatable. Donnelly’s picture of 1906 upstate New York vividly presents the struggles of everyday life in the country: racism, sexism, poverty, back-breaking farm work, primitive medicine, and limited access to education. Reading this book is far from an onerous chore, however; there is plenty of levity, courtesy of Mattie’s little sisters and her best friend Weaver, and readers will delight in the prank Mattie and her friends play on a thoroughly despicable hotel guest. Donnelly shapes each chapter around Mattie’s word of the day, ensuring that readers will walk away from this book with an enriched vocabulary and perhaps a hint of Mattie’s love of words. And Mattie’s courageous decision at the end of the book will leave readers cheering for her, even if they are selfishly a little sad that the book has come to an end.

Young Adult Literature Coming to the Big Screen

Blockbuster film series like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games have proven that there’s a lot of money to be made presenting stories from the pages of young adult fiction on the silver screen. The rest of 2013, and the next few years, promise to be filled with releases of films based on books that have captivated young readers. The line-up is a mixture of newcomers and classics. Teenage book lovers may want to get started on reading the following titles, arranged by release date, if they’re the type who likes to read the book first*. The ages cited below correspond to readers, not movie-goers.

Incase

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare (ages 14+) - August 21, 2013

One reviewer called the first installment of the popular The Mortal Instruments series Buffy-esque, and it’s a fitting term. Fifteen-year-old Clary witnesses a murder that no one else sees and gets swept up in the world of the Shadowhunters, teenage vigilantes who kill supernatural demons and monsters.

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (ages 13+) - October 18, 2013 in the UK; no word on when we’ll see it on this side of the pond

This award-winning book is the story of Manhattan-native Daisy’s trip to the English countryside to visit her cousins. Sounds idyllic, but when terrorists suddenly invade England and war erupts, Daisy and her cousins are forced to fight for survival.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (ages 14+) - November 1, 2013

Ender’s Game, released almost 30 years ago, needs almost no introduction. Brilliant Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is recruited for Battle School where he undergoes vigorous military training so he can help save the world from hostile aliens. Many parents will be just as excited about this release as their kids!

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (ages 14+) - November 15, 2013

We are not the only ones who adore this book; it is the winner of several awards and has been on the best-seller list for several years running. The story is narrated by Death, who has his hands full in WWII Germany. The course of his work brings him several times across the path of young Liesel Meminger, a foster child who is placed with a couple outside of Munich and finds she can’t resist stealing books.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (ages 14+) – 2014, no other date specified

Like most teenage girls, Hazel finds herself suddenly head-over-heels in love. Unlike most teenage girls, she meets the object of her crush at Cancer Kid Support Group, a retreat she attends to help her cope with the fact that her terminal illness is incurable. We hope the movie will do this much-lauded novel justice.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (ages 11+) - February 14, 2014

Fans of The Hunger Games will love this fast-paced book. Thomas, the protagonist, wakes up in an elevator, remembering nothing about his life but his own name. He discovers that he has somehow landed in a world his 60 teenage peers call “the glade,” which they have been trying for two years to escape by navigating through the maze that surrounds it. The Maze Runner is the first book in the eponymous trilogy.

Divergent by Veronica Roth (ages 13+) - March 21, 2014

Beatrice lives in dystopian Chicago, where sixteen-year-old citizens must decide which one of five factions they will belong for the rest of their lives. This book, the first in a three-part series, consists mostly of the initiation trial Tris must undergo as a result of her decision. And, of course, she has a secret she is desperate to keep to herself.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (ages 13+) – 2015

The horses that run in the annual Scorpio Races are no tame thoroughbreds; they’re blood-thirsty, man-eating creatures taken from Celtic mythology. Tomboy-ish Puck and her brothers are barely scraping by after their parents are killed by water horses when Puck’s oldest brother announces that he will be leaving their island to work on the mainland. In a desperate attempt to keep her remaining family afloat, Puck enters the race with her eyes on the purse; as the first female ever to compete, she will pit her inexperience against reigning champion Sean Kendrick and her opponents’ murderous mounts.

The Giver by Lois Lowry (ages 11+) - in pre-production; no release date available

As far as we are concerned this book is the gold standard by which YA dystopian novels-all the rage these days-should be judged. Young Jonas is shocked to learn that he has been chosen to be the next Giver, keeper of the memories people have forgotten, or never had a chance to make in the first place. As an apprentice to the current Giver, Jonas learns more and more about the experiences of people in the past-gifts, family, snow, war, love, pain-and begins to have doubts about his own world. Little information is available about the movie, but Jeff Bridges has been cast!


*Reading the book first isn’t for everyone. Some students achieve much better comprehension if they see the movie before delving into the more complex,demanding, written version. Young people for whom reading doesn’t come as naturally may already have a sense of which order works best for them – book before movie, or movie before book. If not, the movie-book duos above would be great opportunities for experimentation.



All release dates found through www.imdb.com

Recommended Reads: Matched

We are once again bringing you our occasional Friday feature Recommended Reads, where we share some of the wonderful books for children and young adults. This week's book is Matched, by Ally Condie, originally published by Dutton Publishers in 2010.

Matched, by Ally Condie

Ages: 7th grade and up – will most likely appeal more to girls than to boys

Sequels: Crossed, Reached

Movie Adaptation: Disney bought the rights to the Matched trilogy in 2010; however, no release date has been publicized.

Plot
On her seventeenth birthday, Cassia Reyes goes with her parents to City Hall to find out whom she will marry. She’s excited and nervous about this event that every adult in the Society, Cassia’s world, has gone through it before her. Instead of being matched to a boy in a far-off city as she expected, however, Cassia is surprised and thrilled to learn that she’s been matched to her best friend Xander. It seems that, as always, the Society has made the right choice for her. After this seemingly harmonious beginning, Matched quickly morphs into a dystopian novel. When she loads the disc she has been given to learn more information about Xander, she sees Ky’s face flash before her instead before it is replaced by Xander’s. In a world in which there are no errors, how could this have happened? Was Ky, the shy, mysterious boy she barely knows, really intended to be her match? This is the first small crack in the foundation of Cassia’s trust of the Society, which controls its citizens’ meals, reading materials, leisure activities, romantic lives, communication, and even deaths. A forbidden poem smuggled to her by her grandfather, increased scrutiny of the routines she used to take for granted, and her growing relationship with Ky all lead Cassia to slowly learn about the darker side of the Society. Everyone around her is healthy and prosperous, but Cassia learns that this comes at a cost she’s not sure she’s willing to pay anymore.

Our Take
Be warned: Do not give this book to a teenage girl in your life during finals week; she won’t be able to put it down once it gets going. Like other dystopian novels before it—the incomparable The Giver, Brave New World, etc.—Matched presents a world that’s both attractive and horrifying, causing readers to reflect on the true nature of happiness and the importance of freedom. Matched is a very internal book, focusing intently on Cassia’s thoughts so that her transformation from a blindly accepting member of the herd to a brave dissident is striking. We particularly enjoyed the detail with which Condie developed the Society, and she proves to have a keen eye for developing suspense as well. As literature lovers, one our favorite aspects of the book was the frequent and apt allusion to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” The novel served as a wonderful vehicle for exploring both the meaning of Dylan’s poem and of the power of poetry in general. The only thing readers are unlikely to enjoy about Matched is its cliffhanger ending, but rest assured that it’s the first in a trilogy and resolution is only as far as the nearest library.

The Best 100 Young Adult Novels

We love best-of book lists, and National Public Radio has just released a great one. After inviting listeners to nominate their favorites, NPR has published a list of the best 100 novels for young adults.

The selection process was an interesting one, inviting ire from NPR fans who couldn't believe that favorites like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret were left off the list. Judges managed to narrow the list of over 1200 nominees down to 235 finalists, in part by holding firm to the idea that “young adult novels” are books intended for readers between the ages of 12 and 18. Therefore the Little House on the Prairie books, all winners of the Newberry Award, and many other much-beloved tomes, were deemed too juvenile for a vote of this nature. Books written for adults but read by many young adults, such as classics like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Jane Eyre, were also given the ax, though it seems that the judges were unable to part with some titles intended for adults; Dune and Catcher in the Rye both made the cut.

The list of finalists is an eclectic blend of timeless and contemporary titles that vary hugely in sophistication, reading level, and theme. Literature snobs may turn up their nose at some of the results (Twilight? The Vampire Academy??), but parents and educators of reluctant readers will rejoice that the list contains books the teenagers in their lives may find more accessible than the oft-recommended classics on the list (like The Giver, A Separate Peace, and Lord of the Flies). The list is also a great place to turn for fresh ideas. We’re willing to bet you've never even heard of the winner of the fourth place slot. Whether teenagers are looking for a way to pass the few weeks left before school begins, or planning ahead so that they’ll have their mandatory recreational selection in place when classes begin, this list is an excellent place to begin.

100 Best-Ever Teen Novels (NPR)

Photo: Monterey Public Library / Creative Commons