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What's Up in YA

“Grit” Returns to YA…But It Never Actually Left

Hello YA Readers!

spontaneousThis week’s “What’s Up in YA?” newsletter is sponsored by Spontaneous

Mara Carlyle’s senior year is going as normally as could be expected, until—wa-bam!—fellow senior Katelyn Ogden explodes during third period pre-calc. Katelyn is the first, but she won’t be the last teenager to blow up without warning or explanation. As the seniors continue to pop like balloons, smart and hilarious Mara narrates the end of their world as she knows it. But within an explosive year punctuated by romance, quarantine, lifelong friendship, and the hope of making it to graduation lies a funny, super honest, and truly moving story of being a teenager and the heartache of saying goodbye.

At the tail end of last month, the New York Times ran an article by Ginia Bellafante which many readers found to be somewhere between good enough and forgettable enough — perhaps in part because it is a pretty innocuous piece, save for the fact that some readers were irritated by the article’s accompanying image (consider that foreshadowing).  

The longer I’ve thought about the piece, though, the more frustrating it becomes. Let’s break this down bit by bit and closely read what it is Bellafante is really saying.

The piece begins with talking about growing up in the suburbs and reading Judy Blume’s iconic Are You There God?: It’s Me, Margaret. It then proceeds to highlight a couple more early YA authors, including Paul Zindel (The Pigman, among others) and Norma Klein (Domestic Arrangements, among others). But then there’s this paragraph:

For women who grew up in the 1970s and early ’80s — nurtured in the fictions of Ms. Blume, Paul Zindel and Norma Klein among others, writers for whom an urbane brand of social realism was the only reasonable métier — the arrival of the “Twilight” franchise a decade ago, with its enormous success, signaled a gloomy period of regression for the young-adult novel.

And so, the references to Twilight begin. Like any good YA article about ten years past prime, this piece references a mega successful franchise as the beginning of the downfall for young adult fiction. But what stands out is not the tired argument of Twilight being the ruin of YA; what stands out is that Bellafante notes that it’s middle age women who saw the franchise as the downfall of the YA novel.

In other words: not teenagers.

A distinct product of Bush-era gender politics rather than a renunciation of them, the series ultimately has its heroine forfeit a chance to go to Dartmouth to stay home and tend to her half-vampire baby, one conceived after a night of violent sex that leaves her body bruised with a husband who is at least 100 years old.

There was a piece not too long ago, one referenced in this here newsletter, about how YA is too liberal, offering no space for readers whose belief systems don’t fall into left-leaning politics. And yet, here’s an argument that Twilight, with the huge success it had, helmed by a woman who is Mormon, is problematic because it doesn’t reject the American politics of 2005. Because it’s not prescriptively against something, it’s for it, apparently.

It can’t be a vampire book, and it can’t be a book that launched deep and meaningful reading lives for thousands and thousands of young readers.

Rather than digging into the big books of this year, though, the article dives right into contemporary times:

Now, though, the appetite for paranormal lunacy has abated, and issue-driven fiction set very much in a universe of urbanism’s chief concerns is having a renaissance.

uglies-westerfeldI’m going to ignore the phrase “paranormal lunacy” because it’s reductive and patronizing, but it’s curious how there are over 10 years of YA history ignored here. And not only are the years 2005 – 2015 ignored, there is no discussion of what else was going on in 2005 besides Twilight. Those of us who’ve been around long enough or who have been involved in the YA world for a good chunk of time realize that Twilight wasn’t a mega hit the minute it landed. It took time, the right marketing, the book getting into the right hands, and the era of the time being fruitful for such a success.

And it’s curious that these books — many of which were also big hits of 2005 and well beyond — are not mentioned at all:

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Looking for Alaska by John Green

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (middle grade, but with tremendous crossover appeal to YA readers)

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

The Boyfriend List by E Lockhart

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Keeping You a Secret by Julie Anne Peters

Autobiography of My Dead Brother by Walter Dean Myers

As well as books in continuing series by Meg Cabot (yes, The Princess Diaries!), Holly Black, Christopher Paolini, and others. Some other familiar authors who published books in 2005 include David Levithan, Celia Rees, Ron Koertge, Adele Griffin, Robin Wasserman, and Caroline B. Cooney.

monsterTo reduce the downfall of YA to one book and one year is to ignore the wealth of talent and good reading happening at the same time, in the same place, under the same historical and political conditions.

This week, “All American Boys,” a novel by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, an outgrowth of the Black Lives Matter movement, appears on The New York Times’s best-seller list for young-adult books. The story follows the beating of an innocent black child by a white police officer who thinks he has stolen a bag of chips.

Here’s the pivot: Bellafante moves from the downfall of YA through Twilight in 2005 to today’s growth of contemporary, modern issues like Black Lives Matter. She continues:

In a similar vein, “The Hate U Give,” to be released early next year, chronicles the story of a 16-year-old prep-school girl who witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed best friend. A movie version of the novel, by Angela Thomas, is already in progress. And right now, prominently displayed at Barnes & Noble in Downtown Brooklyn, is “Bright Lights, Dark Nights,” a novel about racial profiling set against the backdrop of drugs and violence.

Ah ha. This is really an article about urban-set fiction about black teenagers and racial profiling. 

how-it-went-downThe recent upheavals in the economy stemming from the financial crisis, the rise of racial tensions and the increased animosity toward immigrants that the current election cycle has fed and exposed have arguably made this new catalog inevitable. The world has intruded in the lives of children in so many ugly ways.

But are these books so new? Is this an entirely new catalog? Where’s mention of Kekla Magoon and her book How It Went Down

Consider this: in 2005, as well as before and well after, we had authors writing about urban realities for teenagers. We had the great Walter Dean Myers, for one, as well as Coe Booth (Tyrell, etc), Jaime Adoff (The Death of Jayson Porter), Sharon Draper (The Battle of Jericho and others), Sharon Flake (The Skin I’m In), Angela Johnson (First Part Last), Jacqueline Woodson (After Tupac and D Foster), and a slew of books from imprints like Dafina and KTeen, which focused on black teens in urban stories.

Let’s not forget, either, there were white writers telling these stories, too, including folks like Paul Volponi (Black and White) and Paul Griffin (Stay With Me).

In some sense these new realist novels are even grittier than their predecessors from the 1970s, even though children, especially in New York where crime rates were so high, faced greater perils then. The classic young-adult novel of that period typically dealt with characters managing the fracture of American family life — divorce, a mother’s new boyfriend and so on — but those characters most often enjoyed the comforts of middle-class life. Norma Klein’s Manhattan was as sophisticated as any Woody Allen would devise. Children today may finally be resisting the elusive insulation we crave for them.

Children have had access to books and story tellers interested in coming of age realism, as well as urban grit, since the beginning of YA. Even in those horrible years between the emergence of Twilight and today, authors wrote these stories, and readers — teenagers — found them, either through their own searching or the help of gatekeepers.

But what’s going unsaid here is the thing that needs to be said: these books were never written for nor marketed to those middle age white ladies who are now discovering these gritty, urban coming-of-age stories thanks to better marketing and placement in bookstores. These books were never “for” them in the first place, and even in today’s market where adult buyers make up the majority of YA book purchases, these books are not “for” them. Rather, it’s thanks to the nonstop hard work of those behind diversity movements (a phrase I loathe because “diversity” is simply reality) who are getting more of these books at the forefront of bookstores and into the minds of those readers, like Bellafante, who never once had to pick up books like these.

Let’s step back again, though, and consider what this piece says: back in the 70s and 80s, grit was written by white people.

Today, it’s being written by authors of color.

tyrellBoth are sweeping over generalizations about what grit is and is not, and it overlooks the rich history of YA grit that’s been written before and will continue to be written. It’s thanks to the work of Myers, of Woodson, of Flake, of Draper, and of the other authors listed above who’ve been writing “urban set gritty stories” that parallel the eras and times in which they wrote that today’s authors doing gritty, urban-set fiction are able to tell their stories, too.

So sure, Twilight mirrored the gender politics of 2005 and the Bush era. But Twilight was not the only YA book out then; it was one of many, many hundreds of YA books, and one that chose to zig, rather than zag with the times. Likewise, it’s a book about white characters written by a white author. It cannot and should not be the standard of YA for one year, nor for an era. It’s a bubble which got great marketing and got lucky.

Not to mention that it did extremely well with middle class white ladies, the exact audience that gritty YA isn’t written toward.

Now if only I could better explain why a picture of a white coauthor is paired with this piece that is distinctly about black authors and black fiction, rather than any of the black writers mentioned.

____________________

I can’t help but link again to an interview done here earlier this year with YA author Brandy Colbert. The books we’re seeing promoted and discussed by and about black people are excellent and important and it is, without question, about damn time they’re getting table placement and big discussions about them in places like The New York Times.

But what about those books by black authors that aren’t gritty, urban-set stories? What about those black teens who are suburban? Who are also coming-of-age, but perhaps have lives that aren’t gritty (or that are gritty but not in the way we associate “gritty” with “inner city”)? These books deserve their time, too.

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Thanks for hanging out again for another edition of “What’s Up in YA?”. If nothing else, I hope this piece helped further open your reading lives to a wealth of fiction and authors of color who deserve your attention and consideration, even if they aren’t brand new (or if they are!). It’s worth noting that the majority of authors noted above have a nice, thick catalog of reads, even though they aren’t all mentioned or linked to. 

We’ll see you again next week.

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Swords and Spaceships

Swords and Spaceships November 4

Happy Friday, nerd-friends and fellow geeks.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by All the Books!

Keep up with the most exciting new books coming out each week with our All the Books! Podcast. YA, sci-fi, non-fiction, you name it, we cover it all.

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Let’s talk some headlines, shall we?

If you’ve been wanting the full Hogwarts experience, you’ll want to keep an eye on the sorcerers of Mimbulus Mimbletonia. Next May, you could be practicing your wandwork and potion-making en français at their 4-day wizarding school. If only I had stuck with my high-school French! Which then leads me to wonder, does the language of magic have accents? What does a Beauxbaton levitation spell sound like? If anyone attends/has relevant information, please advise.

We are getting a new Middle-Earth story, and I have questions. But first, the actual news: It’s a previously unpublished novel about the adventures of Beren and Lúthien, written by J.R.R. and not Christopher. Now for my questions: Where has it been? We have had so much posthumous publishing from the Tolkien estate, it’s hard for me to believe that it’s taken this long for a full novel to come to light. I really want it to have been found in a secret compartment in his old writing desk, or perhaps a newly discovered wall-safe? As someone who did read The Silmarrillion (but not Unfinished Tales or Children of Húrin) and found it rough going, I’m also torn on whether or not to preorder a copy. What we already know about Beren and Lúthien is pretty great as backstories go — do I actually want more? Especially if it’s a (who knows how actually-finished) novel? This is something we all must decide for ourselves, I suppose. Regardless, it’s probably not going to be a good pick-up point for someone introducing themselves to Tolkien’s oeuvre.

What do we talk about when we talk about Turkish delight? That is not actually the title of this article but a girl can dream. JSTOR Daily offers us a lovely piece on why exactly Edmund would find Turkish delight the most compelling and wish-worthy of treats in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I spent most of my childhood believing it was some kind of pastry, who knows why.

And now, we need to talk about Dirk Gently. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and Long Dark Teatime of the Soul are my 2nd and 3rd favorite Douglas Adams novels (1st is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 4th is Last Chance to See, in case you were wondering). With this in mind, I was originally very disheartened by the casting for HBO’s new series — while Samuel Barnett is very photogenic, he is neither portly, short, nor wearing a giant flappy hat. I tried to put that aside and give the pilot a chance; perhaps, like the movie, they’d capture the spirit rather than the letter. I am here to report that I tend to agree more with Vulture on this one after seeing the first episode, but the AV Club is holding out more hope (and has seen the first three eps). HBO did nod to the books but also made it clear that previous knowledge of the character and series is not required; your mileage may vary, but I recommend you proceed with caution.

Alright, onto this week’s reviews.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Oh, friends. If you have not read these two books yet, can I just say how jealous I am of you? And if you have only read Long Way, I am so delighted for you to read the sequel! Which is available RIGHT NOW in ebook (but not in print until March 14, 2017). In Long Way we meet the crew of the spaceship Wayfarer, a motley group of humans and aliens who just want to dig wormholes and be left to their own devices. Yes, you read that correctly: in Chambers’ world, people travel across the universe via wormholes and they can be manufactured. And while the world-building (universe-building?) is solid and enjoyable, this is a character-driven story at its heart. Where the various crew members came from, what they’re doing out in the black, and how they stand working with each other fill up the bulk of the plot.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky ChambersSome of them we find out more than others, and some we’re left wanting more — enter A Closed and Common Orbit! It picks up where the previous book leaves off, but we’re no longer on Wayfarer; instead, we’re taking off with two minor characters for a fringe community of hackers, modders. Chambers is asking big questions about both technology and personhood — cloning and artificial intelligence and the logical extensions thereof come under close scrutiny.

If authors like NK Jemisin are busy ripping our hearts out (in the good way), Becky Chambers’ work is more likely to put it back into your chest and fill it with warmth (also, obviously, in the good way). These two books are the perfect escape from the tensions and stresses of this year: enough action to drive the plot along, and a ton of characters to root for.

The Chimes by Anna Smaill
The Chimes by Anna SmaillThe Chimes recently beat out a truly amazing roster of novels (including personal favorites The Fifth Season and Uprooted) for the 2016 World Fantasy Award, so of course I had to pick it up. After reading it, I am somewhat astonished no one shoved it at me in the last year because it’s exactly in my wheelhouse. It takes place primarily in a London that could be our dystopian future, or an alternate timeline, where music is the primary metaphor and memories must be captured externally to be kept. It takes some getting used to the language of the novel: things happen subito instead of suddenly, or lento instead of slowly. If you’re a classically trained musician (like the author) you’ll be fine; if not (like me), you’ll pick it up through context sooner or later. Our young narrator, Simon, finds himself in London on a half-remembered mission from his dying mother without friends, resources, or a plan. It’s especially hard to have a mission or a plan when your memories are wiped clean every day. But the mission finds Simon via his new-found ally Lucien, and he begins to unravel the truth about his own life and his world.

Smaill’s achievement lies in creating a dystopia that feels completely new — I don’t remember ever reading about the beauty and dangers of sound in the ways she lays them out. Simon is a wonderful narrator, and I got attached to the supporting cast as well. This is an absorbing, compelling read, and one that very well could change the way you think about your playlists, the whine of your refrigerator, that song stuck in your head.

 

See you two Fridays from now, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!

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Giveaways

Win a $100 Barnes & Noble Giftcard from Hachette!

We are approaching the white-hot center of holiday shopping season, so whether you are looking for books for friends and family or maybe looking to stuff your own stocking, a $100 Barnes & Noble giftcard would be a nice little present, no?

We have one to giveaway, and here’s out to enter. Fill out the form below, which includes signing up for Hachette’s ebook deal email newsletter. Every two weeks, the folks from Hachette will round-up and send you their best current ebook deals from all their imprints (Little, Brown, etc).

Go here to enter for a chance to win, or just click the pretty, holiday decorated Barnes and Noble photo below:

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Riot Rundown

110116-PRH-UnboundWorlds-Riot-Rundown

Today’s Riot Rundown is sponsored by Unbound Worlds.

unboundworlds_200w_v2Unbound Worlds offers readers insight into books and authors across and between the science fiction and fantasy worlds, including horror, slipstream, pop science, fairy tales and folklore, magical realism, urban fantasy, and anything that’s just a little bit weird.