Loving YA for me starts with being deeply personal. I was
always a reader. I can’t remember a time when books were NOT a part of my
life. My parents took me to libraries
and bookstores, bought me book orders, gave them as gifts….
I remember my father bringing home Garfield comics and
teaching me to read, and my mother buying me a subscription to the Babysitter’s
Club book club which sent me three books a month for a year. (I still have
every one of them). But around sixth or
seventh grade I kind of hit a standstill.
I was beyond the juvenile level reading that the school library carried
and dad’s Tom Clancy books were a little over my head. So what was I to do in a world where J. K.
Rowling, Beth Revis, and Ally Condie didn’t yet exist?
I started with looking for books based on what I liked to
watch. I read a lot of movie adaptation
novels or novels that had popular movies made out of them. This was how I discovered John Grisham and
Terry McMillan. But the pentacle moment came in 7th grade when a man
named George Lucas created a special edition version of three movies that were
extremely popular.
I often refer to this moment as the beginning of my
geekdom. Even though I had some interest
in sci-fi already, thanks to Power Rangers and Quantum Leap, I didn’t not truly
emerge as a diehard fan until I saw, and then began reading, Star Wars.
But anyway, back to YA.
So I was in high school when the Harry Potter craze hit, and I’m now a
soon to be 30-something librarian who is obsessed with young adult
literature. Why? Because it’s well
written, fun, and it’s what I would have wanted to read twenty years ago.
People make fun of adult interest in YA but it’s really
quite simple. Being a teen is hard. We all went through it, or are going through
it (some of us well beyond our thirties but that’s a different post). For me it’s the plain and simple emotion of
it. The characters in these books are
going through something very emotional and intense AND they’re often doing it
in a world where things are already in chaos.
It’s awesome to read Orson Scott Card, or Kevin J. Anderson or Timothy
Zhan and be amazed, but to see someone so young, who in any situation is going
to be highly emotional be put in that situation, ups the stakes to a whole new
level.
I often tell people that YA goes farther than adult fiction
and I believe it’s true. The emotional
depth that the authors put into their characters is amazing. You fall in love with them so much more than
with any adult fiction because they are FEELING it so much deeper. Even the ones that don’t involve fantasy and
sci-fi (yes, I occasionally read those. One cannot live by vampires and rocket
ships alone) are awesome because the emotional journey is even more central to
the plot.
Bottom line, no matter your age, there is something in YA
that everyone can connect to. They are
not dumbed down adult books, or fantasy escapism with pretty covers. They are hard core dramas about a people who
overcome not only the world around them, but themselves.
This post was inspired by Beth Revis’s Celebrate Bookscontest where you can win a library’s worth of amazing YA books.
