I’m skeptical of Steve Salerno’s claim in his Wall Street Journal op-ed that young-adult fiction is “unbearably dark”:
Inspiration has always been the hallmark of young-adult literature, which traditionally consists of reassuring texts infused with values espoused by most of mainstream society. And many of today’s best-selling books in the YA genre remain faithful to that ethic. But such books tend not to catch the eye of the curators of today’s lists of recommended titles, who evidently assume that all students arrive at school traumatized in some fashion.
Therefore, they reason, to meet children “at their own level,†books must deal with sexual abuse, dysphoria, racism, domestic violence, gang life, school shootings and other forbidding aspects of a world that, one would think, is spinning off its axis. As James Blasingame, executive director of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, put it in his Nevada summit keynote speech, YA literature “not only saves lives†but can provide “a map to navigate a world fraught with problems.â€
No one would argue that American life in the early 21st century is flawless. But isn’t it possible for educators and their close allies in the social-justice set to look out across the vastness of contemporary life and see something other than darkness and depravity?
which I think smacks more than a little of “get off my lawn”. How would you go about quantifying how “dark” today’s young adult fiction is compared with that of a year ago, five years ago, ten, twenty-five, fifty? How would you distinguish between being founded on reality and being dystopian? I find today’s reality sufficiently dystopian I can hardly bear to watch the news.
