Why Young Adults Should Read Beyond YA
by Elizabeth Johnstone
I was recently trolling fantasy author Neil Gaiman's online journal looking for the title of a book that I wanted to recommend to a family member while home for the holidays (the book is Good Omens, and it's fabulous), when I noticed that in his routine habit of posting different questions he gets from readers, a recent one was from a woman who was complaining that her twelve-year-old daughter had chosen his novel Stardust to do a book report on. The twelve-year-old bought and read the book, which happened to have the word "fuck" it in printed in very tiny letters and an "explicit" sex scene.
The mom was seriously unhappy and proceeded to accuse Neil Gaiman of false marketing or intentionally luring children into reading an inappropriate story under the guise of a young adult fantasy. Gaiman explains that he wasn't attempting to mislead anyone, and that the book had been written and published as an adult novel. Young adults simply happened to like it, hence the reason it won a 2000 Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) for adult books that young adults enjoy.
So whom is the YALSA talking about when they say "young adults?" Do they mean late teens? Early to mid twenties? Technically, the term "young adult" refers to adolescents, ages roughly 12 to 18. Ignoring the hilarious idea that this age group is our accepted cultural definition of young adulthood, I can safely say that while perhaps Neil Gaiman's book is not entirely appropriate for certain twelve-year-olds, the sex in it is not lewd or explicit, and the single (and very funny in context) use of profanity was probably less damaging than sitting at a middle school lunch table. I understand that the parent has every right to be concerned about what her child is reading. But if she's so concerned about keeping her daughter from reading books with the mention or idea or-God forbid-the act of sex in them, perhaps she should have done better research into the book before she gave the okay. Nowhere, neither on Barnes and Noble.com nor on Amazon, is the book marketed specifically as a teenage book; it is not labeled for the category of young adult.
The description simply sounds too fascinating to resist. It sounds like an adventure, a story of romance and hidden treasures and young people escaping from mundane lives to do something else. The main character, a rather ordinary young man named Tristran Thorn, does something extraordinary-and in the act of doing so, he becomes extraordinary himself. It is a good lesson to learn, that anyone can do great and exciting things-a lesson that is more helpful to learn at the beginning of one's life. The characters also make mistakes. And they deal with them, and face them. That's another good lesson-that our mistakes, no matter how grave, won't kill us.
Censorship and bans are huge in the genre of young adult fiction. Institutional books like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were banned, because some parent didn't like Mark Twain's use of timely rural vernacular. Of Mice and Men: Steinbeck cussed like a sailor. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret: Judy Bloom has a sixth grader wondering shamelessly about menstruation, religion, and sex, all in the same book. More recently, all seven Harry Potter books have been fueling bonfires in church parking lots because obviously, the whole witchcraft thing is akin to actively supporting Satan.
It is very important to a young person to have the opportunity and the encouragement from their parents, their teacher, or whoever, to read whatever they have the inclination to read. In fourth grade, I read a poem out of a book with the word “bastard” in it out loud to my teacher. She laughed. I learned about sex and relationships and how to be a teenager from the Sweet Valley High series, about two twin girls named Jessica and Elizabeth growing up in Southern California. I started reading those books around the fourth or fifth grade, probably earlier.
Maybe these books put ideas into my head and weren't quite age appropriate, despite that they were labeled for young adults-but I am not a bad person for it. The reason I know that Saskatchewan, Canada, exists is from one of those trashy YA books, where Jessica and Elizabeth compete in a national cheerleading competition and their boyfriends sneak in cross-dressed as a team from Saskatchewan. I read Anna Karenina at twelve or thirteen, not much older than the girl who read Stardust, and I didn't understand all of what was going on at the time-I had to re-read it when I was older. But my parents let me do it anyway. It increased my knowledge of the world and the people in it, and that is the only thing that matters. My parents were strict, so I wasn't allowed to watch much TV or see many movies. But I was allowed to read whatever I wanted, and that increased my intellect. That's the reason I can write this article.
Labels don't make any difference. You can't rely on them to decide "age appropriateness." Young adults should not be restrained from reading so-called adult works like Stardust and Philip Pullman"s The Golden Compass. YALSA encourages it, too, with projects "Teen Readers and Adult Books: A Winning Combination." Just read-it doesn't matter if it's not considered classic literature. The exposure to diverse and conflicting ideas and interests is so important at such a confusing time in a person's life. It illuminates what we know; reading highlights and fulfills in areas where we may lack something. It's difficult to gain that sort of knowledge sitting at a desk.
My parents didn't always talk to me about what I needed to know at times I needed to know it. I learned what sex and love were from books. I learned that people do terrible, horrible things. Sometimes I was scared or didn't know what was going on, and sometimes the books even gave me ideas that got me in trouble. But I also learned that even the most unlikely people can do wonderful and exciting things. That's what made me keep on through the traumatizing years of middle and high school, the thought that I had something awesome in me somewhere-maybe not now, but later. Everything I ever read said I did. It's wildly optimistic and silly, but true. I wouldn't give up the knowledge I gained from reading what some might consider "inappropriate books at an inappropriate time" for anything. The imaginary world of books and fiction made me into a real person.
Interestingly enough, after Stardust was made into a movie, Harper Collins released a clean movie tie-in more "appropriate" for young audiences. Maybe the mom should have purchased that instead, but for me, it was too brilliant a mistake to waste.
