YA Shaming 8 Years Later: A Defense of YA Literature

This is an update to my post YA Shaming: Filed Under “Advisement” that I wrote in 2014. I still (mostly) stand by what I said in that post, but I was a teenager at the time. I didn’t have any of the context or most of the experience that I have now, and being a teenager at the time I couldn’t say with confidence that I’d still prefer YA literature as an adult. So now with more of an understanding why people disparage YA and what value it actually does have, eight more years of experience writing persuasive rants, and being a bona fide adult who still prefers YA literature, I wanted to revisit the ideas in that 2014 post and update it with what I know now.

---

My freshman year of high school, I took an AP English Literature class. Every single novel I had to read for the class was about divorce, marital infidelity, or divorcing over marital infidelity. All of these novels were the “literary” kind. And I hated every. single. book. I was a thirteen-year-old who mostly read fantasy and had never been cheated on or divorced or even been on a date, and I did not particularly care about some middle-aged man whining that his wife preferred someone who cared about her and banging his therapist to deal with his midlife crisis.

The final assignment was a reflection paper where I was supposed to talk about what I learned and make suggestions for future classes. I suggested assigning different books. In particular, I remember suggesting The Hunger Games, arguing that it might be interesting to analyze a popular book with the same methods we used on “literary” stuff. Though it took me years to articulate it, not only was The Hunger Games a book I actually enjoyed, the theme of kids having no power to save themselves from adults’ decisions resonated with me, and it was the first book to drive home the idea that the government wasn’t always right. To me, these ideas were just as important as divorce and worth talking about in an English class.

The instructor actually responded to my suggestions. Twelve years and three email accounts later I don’t have the original response anymore, but I remember the essence of it:

“We read real literature in class, sweetie.”

To be fair to the instructor, those probably weren’t the words (or the tone) she used to tell me that she thought The Hunger Games had no place in an English literature class. And over a decade later, I can definitely think of other YA books she may have hated less. But when it comes to literature, we draw a strict line between “worthwhile literature” and “worthless children’s books,” and to many adults, anything in the YA category can never be worth reading.

Literature and Audience

Young adult literature is written for a young adult audience. This seems self-explanatory. But many adults criticizing YA literature as “unrealistic,” “pure escapism,” “instant gratification,” and, yes, “worthless,” seem to have forgotten that these books are not for them. When we adults read YA books, we must remember that we are interlopers in this space. We are welcome to enjoy these books, but these books were not written with us in mind. I am an Official Adult – spouse, job, car payment, and all. To expect books written for high schoolers to cater to my priorities and concerns is not only unrealistic, it’s incredibly entitled.

Young adult literature is written for young adults. So when we say that everything written for this audience is inherently lesser, containing no value beyond entertainment value and never able to rise to the status of “worthwhile reading,” what are we saying about this audience? I may not be in the YA age range anymore, but I vividly remember the frustrated rage of adults dismissing my concerns because to them, my age invalidated anything I might say or think. Looking back, some of those concerns were indeed unimportant, but some of them are issues that I am still concerned about as an adult. And one of them was so serious that having it constantly dismissed by adults became the catalyst for my leaving Christianity.

YA books are written to be relatable to teenagers and focus on things teenagers are concerned about. When we dismiss YA as containing nothing of value, we are also dismissing the things teenagers care about as unimportant.

YA is not a genre; among other things, it’s an indicator of the intended audience. So when you disparage YA, you’re disparaging the audience.

Tricia E., #disrupttexts

Is every YA book a literary masterpiece? Obviously not – but neither is every book written for adults. There is a discussion to be had about what makes a book “worth reading” in the first place, but for now, let’s use “would be discussed in an English Literature class” as our metric. (I personally disagree with the idea that the only books worth reading are the ones you would discuss in English class, but it makes a useful reference point for what society at large views as “worthwhile” reading.)

Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet (a YA novel that also has fantasy elements) contains ideas and themes that would fit perfectly on an English Literature reading list next to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Utopia, exploring what a society without bad people might look like and where evil might hide in a facade of perfection. Meanwhile, any English teacher who received the serious suggestion that the class should read and discuss Jim Butcher’s Storm Front (unquestionably written for adults) would have to stop laughing before they could respond.

Most of us do realize that just because a book is written for adults doesn’t automatically make it a contender for English Literature reading lists. Yet many people think YA books should be excluded from those lists purely based on the audience it is written for. Would it not make more sense to decide which books are discussed in English class based on the ideas, themes, style, and other aspects of the individual book, rather than excluding an entire category, contents be damned, because we think being written for people younger than ourselves makes them lesser?

The Limitations of YA for Adult Readers

When I was thirteen, I loved reading stories where thirteen-year-olds saved the world. I loved seeing people my age pick up slack where adults couldn’t or wouldn’t, answering the call to adventure and solving the problem with cleverness or magic or being a lab-grown superhuman or just being The Chosen One. While I just got frustrated with adults’ refusal to take me seriously, I could watch my counterparts in fiction take matters into their own hands. It was thrilling to see kids my age not worrying about friends or homework but about magic and the fate of the world, going on adventures, being able to make their own choices, and doing things that mattered.

As an adult, the experience is different. These books are still full of cleverness and adventure and magic and often an enjoyable story, but I see the protagonist’s age differently. The things they have to do make for a good story, but they are not things that teenagers – who are, in fact, still children – should have to be responsible for. Even though it is fun to read about a teenager doing something dramatic and epic, I can’t help but remember that these are literal children being forced to put the fate of the world on their shoulders because no one else would. The fact that teenagers have to do these things means that the adults around them have failed.

I still enjoy YA literature as an adult. In my experience, it’s often more creative than adult literature, it has more representation of nonwhite and queer people, it’s less obsessed with sex and/or gritty realism, and it has a je ne sais quoi that most adult literature lacks that makes it more compelling. But the YA books I like best are the ones are the ones where the protagonist is older, especially the ones that stray into the still-nebulous category of New Adult. That way I can forget they are still a child and imagine that they are like me – still young, but old enough to carry the weight. But I’m not even thirty yet, and it’s very possible that the more distance I have from my teenage years, the less books written for teenagers will appeal to me.

To Adults Who Just Don’t Like YA

The things that matter to teenagers don’t matter nearly as much to you once you become an adult. I tried reading a book that hinged on college application stress as an adult, and even though I was only five years from my own high school graduation, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the things these characters were willing to do was so extreme compared to how relatively unimportant graduating high school at the top of your class is in the long run. I can only imagine how much more distant the concerns of YA literature must feel if your high school graduation was thirty years ago.

If you are an adult and you don’t enjoy YA literature, that’s okay. YA books aren’t even trying to appeal to you. If you don’t find books written for teenagers appealing, then there’s no loss on either side.

When it becomes a problem is when we start denigrating an entire category of books as lesser because of the audience and when we start looking down on the people past their teenage years who still enjoy books written for teenagers. You may think that macaroni and cheese is a children’s food, but if you saw me eating macaroni and cheese and came over to tell me I should be ashamed of myself for eating children’s food, I would be fully within my rights I told you to get lost. You can choose if you eat macaroni and cheese, but you cannot choose if I can eat macaroni and cheese or shame me if I do.

I hope that I have made the point that YA literature is not inherently worthless and, like all literature, should be evaluated on the merits of the particular book and not by the audience it’s written for. But even if you don’t find that argument compelling, I hope I can at least make this point: It’s not our job to police what other people read.

Personally, I don’t enjoy most mysteries, but I would never go up to a random person checking out a mystery novel at the library and tell them they should be ashamed of reading something so boring. What reason would I have for doing that? What good does it do me to stop someone else from reading what they like? I enjoy reading books with absurdly, almost unbelievably powerful protagonists. But what benefit would it have for anyone to tell me that such books are “unrealistic” and “pure escapism” and keep me from reading it? All they have done is stopped me from reading something I like. The only possible benefit to them is to make themselves feel superior to me.

Other people do not have the exact same opinions and preferences as you, and in the case of reading material, that doesn’t affect you. Even though I don’t personally enjoy mysteries, someone else reading mystery novels doesn’t affect me in the slightest. I enjoy YA, and that doesn’t affect you (unless you’re following my blog where I review a lot of YA, in which case you’re absolutely welcome to unfollow). Part of being an adult is recognizing that you don’t get to decide what other people do with their lives. Whether or not you personally enjoy YA, or even think YA is worth reading, is your choice, but other adults’ choices of reading material aren’t your responsibility.

A Theory of Classic Books

Note: “Classics” and “classic literature” in this post refers to classics of the Western literary canon. I have read a grand total of one classic of a non-Western canon so far and thus don’t feel qualified to speak on them.

---

Nearly every American high schooler is given a specific canon of “classic literature” to read, analyze, discuss, and write essays about. Though the particular books chosen in any given English Literature class varies, the list that they are picked from is finite. My mother was very into the idea of “classic literature” when I was a teenager and made me read a lot of the more recognizable titles. A sampling:

• The Great Gatsby (hated it)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (hated it)
• Animal Farm (hated it but at least it was short)
• Les Misérables (took forever to get through, but liked it)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (it was okay)
• The Old Man and the Sea (hated it)
• Fahrenheit 451 (don’t remember it but it’s on my list of read books)

You will notice a theme of the books listed above: They’re all old.

The list above is only a sampling of ones that I personally read, but even on longer lists (and I’ve looked at many), this theme still holds true. The newest classic I read was To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960. Very few books on lists of classics are more recent than that – in all the lists I’ve looked at, I only recall seeing one book that was published less than 50 years ago.

You’ll notice another theme of the books in my list above: Most of them I did not like.

To be fair, I was a teenager, and when rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four as an adult I found that while I still didn’t like it, I was able to appreciate it. But from my very unscientific method of asking people I know what they thought of the classics they had to read in school, that seems to hold true for a lot of people. People may have liked one or two of the assigned classics, but for the most part, classic books aren’t something to be enjoyed, they’re Important Literature to be suffered through because they have Themes and Motifs and such.

Using the very rigorous method of “thinking at work because my earbuds died and the idea sounds pretty good,” I have developed a theory of why and how books become classics:

A book being considered “classic literature” does not necessarily depend on its entertainment value, enjoyment of the experience of reading, or literary prowess, but rather on being a book that had a new idea (conceptually or stylistically) or was the first to discuss a particular topic.

This would explain why in every list of classic books I’ve looked at (and I looked at six just while writing this post), there was only a single book published more recently than 1960. As time goes on, more and more books are published, and sooner or later almost every topic already has an older book that did it first.

This definition holds true for many of the books on my list at the beginning of this post, and for most classics on “top 100” lists. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are the precursors to the entire dystopian genre. Frankenstein was the first science fiction. Dracula was the first popular vampire novel. The Bell Jar was one of the first (if not the first) to tackle mental health from a feminist angle.

However, this does not hold true for all classic books. Almost everything by Charles Dickens, writer of the well-known and much-adapted A Christmas Carol (one of the first books to romanticize Christmas traditions in fiction) is considered a classic. Even someone who has never heard of his book Martin Chuzzlewit will immediately categorize it as a “classic book” once they know Charles Dickens wrote it. And then there are classics like The Odyssey, which may or may not have been groundbreaking in their time but are classic for the virtue of being old with few or no existing contemporaries.

So I have added a few corollaries onto this theory of classics:

a. A book may be considered a classic if it is written by a “classic author,” i.e. an author who has at least one other work that is considered a classic under the primary theory.

b. A book may be considered a classic if it is so old that we have few or no contemporary works and so has historical significance regardless of other merit.

Now, I am in no way a literary scholar. I’m just a person who reads too many books (over 1,000 since I started keeping track in 2010) and has emphatically not enjoyed most of the classic literature of the Western canon. This is probably better described as a Hypothesis of Classic Books, and definitely needs more research into literary origins. Some of the books I’ve mentioned, like Dracula and A Christmas Carol, were not the first to have their ideas but the first to have their ideas and be a commercial success and reach a wide readership, while their actually original predecessors only reached small audiences and are generally obscure. Future variations of this hypothesis will need to take commercial success and readership numbers into account. But until I actually do that further research, my Theory of Classic Books will sit here in hypothesis form.

Book Review Are Never Accurate

That’s a pretty provocative title for a post on a book review blog, isn’t it? So let’s talk about the psychology behind why book reviews are never going to be accurate to the experience of reading a book.

The Psychology of Experiencing

Psychological research has determined that we have two “selves” when it comes to experiences – the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self is what happens in the moment, as whatever you’re experiencing is happening. The remembering self is how you remember whatever it is looking back.

I first became aware of this idea through research on the human experience of pain. I wish I could find the original study I read, but the experimenters determined that the experiencing self experiences the pain throughout the experience fairly accurately, but the remembering self remembers how bad the pain was based on an average of the worst moment and the last moment of the painful experience. So if your experiencing self experienced most of the event as 2/10 on a pain scale, but there were a few moments of 5/10 and at the end it was 4/10, your remembering self will recall the experience as being about a 4.5/10 even though most of it was less painful.

It turns out that there are people talking about this idea outside of pain research, but I only discovered this while looking for the original pain research article to link in this post. (The book Thinking, Fast and Slow is apparently all about this idea and I hear the author’s TED talk explains the idea pretty well.) But it only recently occurred to me that this idea can be applied to books and book reviews.

When I reviewed The Library of the Unwritten, I wrote that I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, but when I sat down to write a review I had no idea what I liked so much about it. This is an extreme example of the experiencing self and the remembering self differing. My experiencing self really, really enjoyed reading that book. My remembering self was just ambivalent about it. If my experiencing self had been able to write the review, it would have been full of praise. But since it was my remembering self doing the writing, the review wasn’t nearly as positive.

And that is the inherent drawback of book reviews. The self that actually reads the book is the experiencing self, but the self that writes the review is the remembering self. And sometimes these two selves have very different opinions. Sometimes, like I did with The Library of the Unwritten, the experiencing self had a fabulous time and would unashamedly recommend the book to everyone, but the remembering self has no idea why and therefore writes a much less positive review. Sometimes the experiencing self is fairly ambivalent to the experience of reading but the remembering self keeps thinking about ideas and concepts it presents and writes a more positive review because it “stuck with me.”

Because the self that reads the book is not the same self that writes about it, a review is never going to be a completely accurate depiction of both experiencing the book and remembering the experience, and what accuracy there is skews heavily towards the remembering end of the spectrum.

So What’s the Point of a Book Review?

Personally, I write book reviews purely because I enjoy doing it. But I also read reviews, because even though they may not be accurate to the experience of reading the book (or relevant to what I might remember, since every reader is different), I can still find out valuable information from reviews. The back cover is designed to make the plot of the book sound as appealing as possible – that’s it. It often cuts things relevant to the story in order to make snappy sales copy. But a review can tell me more – what tropes are involved, if there’s a romance and if so what kind, triggering content, what kind of emotions the story brings up, all sorts of things that the back cover won’t tell me.

So even though reviews are never going to be completly accurate to both the experience of reading a book and remembering it afterwards – and someone else’s review is never going to completely match your own experience – I find value in reviews anyway. Reviews aren’t an end-all be-all perfect and immutable judgment of a book, but they are a valuable tool for giving you more information about a book you’re considering reading.

I Prefer YA Over Adult (Despite Being Definitely An Adult)

I like YA books. That fact is pretty obvious by the sidebar of this blog, which shows I’ve reviewed 47 adult books and 196 YA books. (These numbers used to be a lot more dramatic, as I’ve previously deleted about a hundred YA book reviews that I wrote back in high school and that were, ahem, not very good.) Roughly 80-90% of the fiction on my TBR list is YA. When I go to libraries and bookstores, I gravitate towards YA.

I’ve been trying for years to put my finger on exactly why. And I think I’ve finally figured it out – at least enough to write about it.

Adult speculative fiction is boring

I like speculative fiction, especially fantasy and adjacent genres. When I search for an adult speculative fiction novel, I can be pretty sure most of what I’m going to find includes:

• Protagonist: A straight white guy somewhere between 25 and 45. If he’s on the older end, he’s jaded, hard-boiled, and better at One Important Thing (probably a fighting style or a magic skill) than everyone else; if he’s younger, he’s naive, clueless, and better at the One Important Thing than anyone else.
• Pick a love interest: Princess damsel who needs saving OR fellow adventurer who needs rescuing because she’s not nearly as good at everything as our protagonist. May dislike the protagonist at the beginning but will always fall swooning into his arms by the halfway point. Guaranteed to be thin and sexy.
• Misogyny! Might be just “heroine needs hero to rescue her and falls madly in love with him because he’s so much stronger than her weak womanness.” Might be more explicit.
• Unnecessary sex scenes. Sometimes graphic. Not always consensual.
• Generic high fantasy medieval-Europe-based world. Generic high fantasy magic system.
• If there are any fantasy races or creatures, there’s probably stupid ugly orcs, pretty stuck-up elves, and dragons. Maybe dwarves.
• An attempt to be J.R.R. Tolkein or Brandon Sanderson that just makes the book about 50% longer than it needs to be.

All of those tropes I just mentioned are for high fantasy, and there’s a reason for that. When I’m browsing the adult section at the library, high fantasy is about the only thing on the shelf that I’m really interested in. I like speculative fiction the best, but if I skip romance, hard-boiled detective fiction, and Attempting To Be The Next Great American Novel, there’s not much left besides high fantasy.

Where am I going to find an adult book that focuses on what happens after you return from your adventure and realize you don’t fit in your own world anymore? What about a historical heist fantasy in a magical version of La Belle Epoque? Or an adventure to bring magic back to fantasy Nigeria? Or something that crosses genres and is solidly science fiction but it feels like fantasy and there’s also sort-of magic? How about an adult fantasy book featuring Black, brown, disabled, neurodivergent, and queer characters as protagonists and heroes and love interests, instead of just footnotes, torture porn, comic relief, or completely absent and not missed?

That’s not to say there are no unique and creative adult books out there, because there are. I’ve actually read several lately. They’re just a lot harder for me to find than unique and creative YA books. It might be because I’m more familiar with YA and therefore more likely to discover unique YA novels. And adult novels were published for decades before YA even emerged as a category, so there’s a much larger quantity of crap for me to wade through to find the gems.

Ranking literature

People rank genres of books. And I’m not talking about “I rank fantasy higher than science fiction because I like fantasy better.” I’m talking about how we as a society decide the worth of various genres. Some people refer to the romance genre as “trashy” because that genre is seen as having little value. A “literary” novel with big words and self-absorbed tangents about divorce, midlife crises, and having sex with women two decades younger then you is generally going to be thought of as “better,” more “serious” literature than any fantasy novel, regardless of personal preference. Some even go so far as to say fantasy is not “real literature” at all and not worth reading except for mindless entertainment.

I could make a pretty solid argument that just because there’s dragons in a book doesn’t mean it has nothing of value. (I may do a post on that later, actually.) But instead, I want to ask why. Why do we as a society think “genre fiction” like fantasy and science fiction are less valuable than “literary” works? Who decided that to be considered “literary,” a book had to be contemporary and full of angst? Who decided what gets considered “real literature,” and that if something doesn’t meet the standards of “real literature” it’s not worth reading?

#DisruptTexts

#DisruptTexts is a movement by and for teachers “to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.” They have many interesting things to say, but this quote is particularly relevant here:

In our ELA [English Language Arts] classrooms, white supremacy shows up in one important way: the worship of the written word. If something isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist. If a book is not in a written format and hailed as “rigorous” or labeled as “classic,” then it’s unimportant and doesn’t make it onto our book lists. If something isn’t written in a western format, then it isn’t worthy of classroom study. This is the bias we hold against graphic novels. When it comes to novels in verse, many teachers doubt their complexity because of word choice. Let us ask you this question: Who determined that long words were the only words that could be considered complex? Additionally, who determined that many words on a page is better and more rigorous?

Julia E. Torres, “Disrupting Genre”

Our culture considers YA books to be less than adult books (an issue I wrote about all the way back in 2014), formats like graphic novels and novels in verse to be less than prose, and speculative fiction to be less than contemporary. But are they really?

Another idea that surfaced during our chat was the issue of young adult (YA) novels and how so many teachers dismiss it due to beliefs that it lacks “rigor” and “seriousness.” … This literature is written for young people and discussing topics they are concerned with. Often, YA surfaces issues of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexuality, that “classical” texts don’t address. And often, when they do address it, because they’re a product of their time, they’re highly problematic. Our own Tricia E. explained, “YA is not a genre; among other things, it’s an indicator of the intended audience. So when you disparage YA, you’re disparaging the audience.”

Julia E. Torres, “Disrupting Genre”

Where do I go when I want to read about people like me? When I go to the classics, or “literary” works, or even the vast archives of adult fantasy, it’s hard to find people like me. It’s hard to find bi characters, or trans or nonbinary characters, or polyamorous characters, or neurodivergent characters, or disabled characters. It’s even harder for non-white people, for whom it’s difficult to find characters who even look like them. And if we only turned to those genres, not only would those of us outside the straight cis white “default” never get to read about characters like us, we’d all miss out on the diversity of stories people different from us can tell.

When I’m looking for those stories – stories about people like me or people different from me, stories that differ from the white cisheteropatriarchal narrative of my culture – I turn to YA because that’s where it’s easiest for me to find them. YA tackles these topics much more often than adult fiction. I prefer YA over adult because that’s where I find uniqueness and diversity in fantasy stories.

Why Do I Write Reviews?

Note: I like to figure out what I think by writing about it. This is a little personal reflection I did to answer for myself why I keep this blog running even though it’s not popular and I’m not trying to make it popular. It has little to do with books or reviews and a lot more to do with me, the reviewer. If you’re just here for the book thoughts and not for personal reflections, feel free to skip this one – no hard feelings.

---

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why I write reviews. This blog is not very popular. It has a grand total of 78 followers and has received about 8,000 total views in the nearly 9 years I’ve been running it (and some of those are probably WordPress miscounting my visits as other people’s views). Very few people know who I am or care what I have to say about books, and that’s fine. I worked in digital marketing for nearly a decade – if I wanted this blog to be popular I could have put some effort into making it popular.

So if hardly anyone cares what I have to say and I’m not trying to get more people to care, why do I keep putting time and effort into writing all these reviews?

Habit

I started reviewing books in 2010 and I’ve been consistently reviewing (and posting on this blog) since 2012. That’s over eight years writing reviews. Eight years of just about anything will likely make it into a habit. At this point, it feels a little weird to finish a book, record that I read it, and not write a review.

Accomplishment

I am very driven by feelings of accomplishment. Checking things off a list? Love it. Empty email inbox? Perfection. That moment when you finish a project and can close the 15 browser tabs you had open for it? I’m swooning. Completing a book is a great feeling of accomplishment.

But if that’s the case … why write a review? I already track my reading in two places: An Evernote note listing the books I read each year, and The StoryGraph (a Goodreads alternative). When I finish the book, I can add it to my Evernote note and move it from “Currently Reading” to “Read” in The StoryGraph. Why do I need to write my thoughts and post them like the world cares?

Enjoyment

I think, deep down, this is a purely selfish blog. I write reviews because I like it. I like putting my thoughts about a book into words on a page, especially if it’s a book I have strong feelings about. I like being able to read my thoughts about books I’d completely forgotten about. I like doing the book round-ups to summarize my reading for the year. I like playing with the format and design of the blog itself. It’s just a lot of fun.

I think that’s a lot of the reason I don’t really care how many people read my reviews. I’m not doing it for the view counts or for readers who are expecting me to put out a review every Tuesday at 9am. I don’t get review copies anymore, so I’m not even doing it for authors or publishers who are expecting publicity. I’m doing it for me, because I enjoy writing reviews and posting reviews and looking through a blog that records my thoughts on the books I’ve read.

So whatever reason you’re here, if you’re one of my 78 followers or not, welcome! Look around, read some book thoughts, maybe find something you want to read (or find something you disagree with me about!). I appreciate that you’re here. But even if you leave this post and never come back, this blog will keep going just like it always has, because I just like writing reviews.

The Two Types of Queer Books (and Why We Need Both)

There are basically two kinds of queer books:

1. Books about being queer
2. Books where being queer isn’t a big deal

(You also sometimes get books that do both.)

Books about being queer are pretty obvious. Books about characters coming to terms with their sexuality. Books about characters discovering their gender identity. Books about coming out. Books about dealing with homophobia or transphobia.

Books where being queer isn’t a big deal, on the other hand, have queer characters, but their gender identity is treated like any other gender, or their queer romance is treated like any straight romance would be. These are books that focus on other things (magic, adventure, school drama) and just happen to have queer characters.

I prefer the second kind. I like my fantasy and my scifi and my superhero books with characters like me – not straight, not cisgender – where the characters can just live and experience the plot and fall in love (or not) without dealing with people hating them for who they are.

But we need both kinds of books. Books about being queer are important. Queer people struggling with homophobia or transphobia or biphobia or aphobia or whatever other prejudice they’re dealing with need to see their stories represented. Heterosexual cisgender people need to see us humanized in stories and have an opportunity to learn (in a way) what it’s like to be on the receiving end of those biases.

But that can’t be the only kind of story we tell. We also need books where being queer isn’t a big deal. I think this quote makes my point best:

“I think there can be a demand for authors from marginalized backgrounds to write difficult, heartrending stories about the challenges of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, or other oppressions. To write books that “teach” the mainstream about our experience. And we can internalize that demand, as I did. While it’s really important to allow kids of all backgrounds to see their own community’s suffering and resilience reflected in books – it can’t be the only, or the predominant, type of narrative we see out there. I worry about the tendency to demand the performance of pain from marginalized communities for others’ voyeurism. People from marginalized backgrounds have all sorts of stories – and it’s important to make room for that variety. Who is allowed to be happy? Who is allowed to be magical? Who is allowed to be funny? These can be political questions. Joy can be a type of resistance.”

~Sayantani DasGupta

Queer people also need to see ourselves reflected in stories as happy, as magical, as funny, as living our lives and being the heroes without reliving the prejudice and bigotry we face every day. (And for that matter, heterosexual cisgender people need to be able to see us in stories that aren’t “oppression porn” and portray us queer people as characters as vibrant, interesting, and varied and in plots as interesting as straight characters.)

Yes, we need to be able to tell stories about our oppression. But we also need to be able to tell stories about our joy. And personally, those stories – the ones where I see myself reflected in queer characters that are happy and magical and funny – are the ones I really want to read.

YA Shaming: Filed Under “Advisement”

I know I’m a little late to the ball game here, but I just recently came across Ruth Graham’s article Against YA. I’ve seen responses blowing up Twitter with the #promoteaYAinstead and #NoShameYA hashtag, but I wasn’t really sure what started it all until yesterday.

When I read the title of the article, I was set to argue. If you want to fight YA, I’m going to fight back! But as I read, I realized something:

I understand her point.

That’s not to say I agree with the article. On the contrary. I read a lot of YA. And even though I do read some adult books, I much prefer the subjects and variety of YA. But I can understand Ruth Graham’s perspective, because it’s the same perspective my mom has.

My mother knows I read mostly YA. And she doesn’t really approve. She keeps pushing me to read adult books – “real” books.

See, Ruth Graham, my mother, and pretty much anyone older than forty were teens when YA wasn’t really a genre. There were children’s books, and there were adult books, and as soon as you outgrew Nancy Drew it was time to head to the adult section. To them, YA is children’s books.

Graham also mentions outgrowing YA. That’s completely understandable. I’ve tried to reread some of my favorite books from the preteen years, and they don’t have the same appeal. And many middle grade books don’t appeal to me as much as I think they’d appeal to my eleven-year-old sister. I’ve pretty much outgrown middle grade, and that’s okay with me. If you outgrow YA, that’s okay.

As Graham claims, some YA is purely entertainment. Some of it is all about “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia.” And I will be honest – sometimes, I want a just-for-fun read.

But not all YA is useless. Take the Hunger Games trilogy: sure, a reality-TV show where kids kill each other is just plain ridiculous, but Katniss and Peeta both ended up with PTSD and the revolution practically destroyed their world.

And Divergent, which Graham called “trashy” and a book that “nobody defends as serious literature”: I found themes of identity, priorities, using your unique gifts, and the power of choices. And in the end of the series, their entire world falls apart and a whole lot of characters I’d grown to care about died.

How much more real does Graham want? And who would call those endings “satisfying”? Not me.

Just because a book is classified as “YA” doesn’t mean it’s pointless. And just because a book is “adult” doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile. YA can contain important themes, and adult can be pure escapism.

I see where Ruth Graham is coming from. She holds the view common among older adults that YA is children’s lit. And she’s outgrown it. That’s okay. I can respect that.

I think the real issue here is not YA versus adult books – it’s because people are being shamed for what they like to read. 42% of college students in America will never read another book once they graduate. Shouldn’t we be happy they’re reading, instead of criticizing because they’re not reading what you want them to?

Ruth Graham has the freedom to read whatever she wants – and if it’s not YA, that’s okay. But the rest of us have that freedom, too.

If you don’t like YA, that’s okay. But please don’t hate on me because I do.