Building a YA Library, Part I

I could, and will at some point, devote an entire blog entry to why I think young adult literature is wildly underrated by those who believe that anything written for a target audience 18 and under cannot possibly have the depth or sophistication that a book written for a mature audience could have. This is an uneducated perspective, and, in my humble opinion, a major mistake. But for my first substantive blog post on this subject, what I want to do is show not tell. This post isn’t about why you should be reading YA. It’s what you should be reading if you want to begin reading YA.

So let’s suppose you want to dig into this genre and see what there is to see. I’ve composed a list of what I would recommend if I wanted to teach someone about today’s young adult literature and where it comes from, and I’ve divided it into a few parts. This post is Part I of the list. To start your education in YA, I recommend beginning with the classics listed in this post.

The Classics

The four books listed below have been around for a while, but they each incorporate some of the core themes of young adult literature. As you will see, young adult literature is keen on seeing characters overcome adversity, and any time the protagonist can do so without parental supervision, that’s especially favorable. But there are other common themes that young adult literature includes, such as various romantic themes and encounters with societal struggles.

For me, the following four books cover that broad spectrum, and if you read these four, you should have a really good base from which to understand more recently written young adult literature.

1. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Core themes: orphaned protagonist, spirit trumps wealth, wit & grit, overcoming adversity, friends-to-lovers

Red-headed, freckled Anne Shirley, who hits Avonlea like a full-speed train, has been a beloved character in young adult literature since 1908. Her story appeals to young adult readers because she comes from nothing and uses her wits, grit, and imagination to charm her way into the hearts of Matthew and Marilla Cuthburt, sibling owners of Green Gables, and later best friend, Diana Berry, future husband, Gilbert Blythe, and pretty much all of Avonlea and Prince Edward Island.

Now, we meet Anne as an eleven-year-old in Anne of Green Gables, and that's quite a bit younger than the YA protagonists of today. Also, some of her early adventures are maybe a bit juvenile. But Anne grows up a bit in the first book, and you can follow her all the way to adulthood if you finish the series. So I think of this as one of the first young adult series to show us character development of a spunky female hero over many years. Also, Anne gives us some relationship tropes that are really beautiful for the young adult set, including her enemies-to-friends-to-lovers relationship with Gilbert Blythe, which you can compare to her love-at-first-sight relationship with "bosom" friend, Diana Berry.

Fun personal note: L.M. Montgomery was the first author I read who was able to create a world and characters that I loved so much that I just wasn't satisfied when the seven-book series ended. Also, I read my mom's copies first--a set of old, green hardcover books with spines that were falling off--and it was the first time it occurred to me that a cover does not actually determine whether you'll love a book.

My obsession must have been impossible to miss because my parents actually planned a vacation to Prince Edward Island when I was a teenager, and we drove all the way out from Michigan so that I could see the place. It's beautiful. In my dreamiest of writer dreams, I rent a cabin up there once a week every summer and go to write the most romantic young adult stories I can imagine. I'm pretty sure that if I wrote from the land that inspired my all-time favorite writer, I would be inspired to write things that would make my all-time favorite character, Anne--who ultimately became a writer herself--very proud.

2. The Giver by Lois Lowry

Core themes: special powers, post-apocalyptic, isolation, spirit trumps power, overcoming adversity, save the children

In The Giver, our hero, Jonas, lives in a society that is manufactured to be pleasant and orderly, and the society manages that by protecting the vast majority of its people from anything that could be painful, including memories of past painful events. Since pain is often associated with joy, the society is also mostly void of joy. But Jonas is picked out as "different" because he gets glimpses of color that no one else gets. So he becomes The Receiver, the one person of his time chosen to receive memories of pain and joy from The Giver, the only other person in their society who holds those memories.

The Giver was the first post-apocalyptic novel I read, and since it wasn't published until 1993, it might not feel like a "classic" to someone who grew up in an earlier generation than I did. But this book is particularly important to understand young adult literature because even though post-apocalyptic novels were by no means new in 1993 (see Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984), it was one of the first written for a young adult audience. After The Giver, YA becomes a hot bed for the post-apocalyptic set, and if you read YA today, you'll find that dystopia and "what would life be like for a teenager after the world ended" books are extremely extremely common. We LOVE post-apocalyptic dystopia in YA.

What else stands out here as particularly "young adult?" A society in which the adults have all basically become corrupted/brainwashed and a story where our young protagonist becomes a hero not because he has done something special to prove his worth but because he was born different. Since teenagers often feel as though they "don't fit in" and they see the world with a lot of angst, the fantasy of being the one person who sees things others don't is extremely appealing.

Don't read The Hunger Games, Divergent, or Red Queen before you read The Giver, or you really won't understand where all the fuss about the special rebel who fights the insane post-apocalyptic society comes from.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Core themes: growing pains, civil rights, current societal challenges, seeing a parent/adult as fallible

So in 1960, did Harper Lee mean for her book to become a staple of high school literature? I don't think so. I think when she dreamed up Scout, Jem, and Atticus Finch, she was trying to tell an adult story about race, prejudice, and how children encounter it. Certainly, To Kill a Mockingbird differs from most young adult literature in that it's protagonist, Scout, is very young, and she's mostly telling stories about things that are happening to other people. Most specifically, she's telling the story of how Atticus Finch, her dad, defends Tom Robinson, an innocent black man accused of raping a white girl, in a very racist Southern court. And yes, that's a very adult story.

Still, I think it would be a major mistake not to give this book a look if you wanted to learn more about YA, because its appeal is very potent for the teenage reader. In this book, we see a relatively naive girl grow up, and she does it watching her dad, her brother, her black cook, Calpurnia, and her reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley, take on a whole town's racist mindset. They don't exactly win. Scout is also threatened personally because of her dad's willingness to represent Tom Robinson, and she has to watch her dad struggle with a problem he can't entirely solve.

There's nothing more hopeful about young adult literature than its willingness to take on very difficult subjects without resorting to black and white thinking and happily ever after endings. Readers of young adult literature almost always have to see issues from more than one perspective, their beliefs and ideals are challenged, and they must figure out how to navigate worlds that don't always become what they should. And then again, young adult literature almost always provides the reader with some hope that things are going to get better in the end. There's a real art to providing realism and hope to your readers at the same time.

I could be biased--I was highly influenced by To Kill a Mockingbird, and I think it's probably part of why I wanted to be an attorney--but Harper Lee really did this for her readers, even if she didn't realize how appealing her book would be to young adults when she wrote it.

4. Forever by Judy Blume

Core themes: growing pains, life is not a fairy tale, sex, "adult" themes like drugs, alcohol, and suicide

I was kind of a Judy Blume disciple as a kid, if you count reading the entire Superfudge series as a disciple. I'm pretty sure I read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing at least three times. I still remember the part where Peter's little brother, Fudge, eats his pet turtle. I still remember that the main character's name was Peter! But the Fudge books were middle grade books, and I was stunned to learn a few years later that Judy Blume was writing young adult books also. Well, not just young adult books. Young adult books about girls' periods, girls' bodies, and--lowers voice to a whisper--girls who have sex.

It was a revelation. And for sure not just for me. That book, which I got from the library in the same section where I found the Sweet Valley High series (no sex that I remember) and the Lurlene McDaniel books (some sex and LOTS of tragic death), had a battle worn cover. Also, it would flip right open to the scene where the protagonist, Katherine, meets her boyfriend's ... uh ... well ... his Ralph. No joke. That's what he called it. I did not realize for YEARS how much Judy Blume truly understood about men that was contained in that one little tiny aspect of the book.

Point is, the book was about sex, and this is a major distinction between middle grade books and young adult books. Romance is a vital element of most young adult books, which are as much about relationships as self-identity. Like it or not, in a young adult book, teenagers and sex mix. And Forever is such an important book because Judy Blume wrote it with a specific purpose regarding sex. Here's what she says on her website:

"This book was first published in 1975. My daughter Randy asked for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die. She had read several novels about teenagers in love. If they had sex the girl was always punished—an unplanned pregnancy, a hasty trip to a relative in another state, a grisly abortion (illegal in the U.S. until the 1970's), sometimes even death. Lies. Secrets. At least one life ruined. Girls in these books had no sexual feelings and boys had no feelings other than sexual. Neither took responsibility for their actions. I wanted to present another kind of story—one in which two seniors in high school fall in love, decide together to have sex, and act responsibly." ~Judy Blume

Think about that. Judy Bloom decided in the 1970s to write a book where an empowered girl has sex with a boy, responsibly, and it does not ruin her life. She never gets punished. She eventually breaks up with the guy when her feelings for him fade and she finds out she's attracted to someone else. Judy Blume gave decades of teenage girls an appropriate model of sex. If more young adult novels followed that early model, we'd probably all be better off. That's why this one made my list.

What else?

There are many books I did not include on this list that still show up in lists like Time’s 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. Why?

Well, one reason is time. What is “classic” to me versus what is “classic” to you probably depends a lot on what you were reading–and what was available to you to read–when you were a teenager. My classics are based on what was there for me as a teenager in the 90s.

Another reason is taste. I have a preference for certain young adult subgenres, including contempoary, fantasy, sci-fi, and royal. When I read YA, I tend to go for the stuff with female protagonists. I’m not a huge fan of adventure books or drama. So you won’t see Hatchet, The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, or The Hobbit on my list, even though I read all of those books and agree that they are classics.

And there is a third reason that my list differs from, say, the Time list, which is that a lot of classic literature that was really written for a middle grade audience is today grouped in with that which would have made more sense for a young adult audience. There is a big difference between middle grade and young adult today, and I think that we should be using today’s standards to classify books, not because they are better but because the whole point of classifying a book is to help today’s readers find the right books for them.

Therefore, you will not find books like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Bridge to Terabitha, The Secret Garden, and The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler on my list of classic YA books. The Chronicles of Narnia, one of my favorite series ever, doesn’t belong on this list. Those books wouldn’t fit on the YA shelves in any of today’s bookstores. They would go squarely into middle grade. But don’t worry. Middle grade is also a genre I love. There will be a post about middle grade books in the future, too.

Next up…

In Part II of this series, I’ll list for you the YA books you need to read to understand how the genre changed with the advent of Harry Potter and Twilight. But that’s for another post. What do you consider a “classic” YA read? Comment with your favorites below!