Category Archives: Young Adult Fiction

December 6, 2014 · 6:44 pm

Ship Breaker: The Young Adult Fiction Debate

2014 has been a year for “think pieces” on young adult fiction. Beginning with the Slate “Against YA” , other writers took up the question of why adults read fiction purportedly written and marketed to young adults and many asked whether this was a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing (see The New York Times “The Death of Adulthood” , Salon’s defense of The Fault in Our Stars, the New Yorker’s “The Great YA Debate” and Book Riot’s take “23 Things I’d Rather Read than Another Think Piece On What’s ‘Wrong’ With Children’s Literature” — what is a ‘think piece’ anyway, if not another way for Slate to describe an article?)

What I want to do here is not to rehash the same ‘good’ or ‘bad’ question, but rather to describe three moments from Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker that, to me anyway, suggest that the genre debate is beside the point. What we would be better off doing, as readers, as cultural consumers, is asking questions about the merits of individual books, how they get read and discussed, what their impact might be on readers of whatever age. When we fall into disparaging an entire [genre][generation] we forget that the nuance and depth of individual books within this genre varies wildly, just as those who read them do. To the extent that we might be better off asking if there are “good” and “bad” readers, rather than ‘good’ or ‘bad’ choices of texts.

Tirade aside – here’s three things about Ship Breaker that I found provocative:

1. The exploration of income inequality and precarious labour: As the novel opens, our protagonist, Nailer, is maneuvering through the dangerous innards of a ship in order to extract valuable copper for his owner/patron. While doing this work we learn that this work will soon be beyond him as he’ll grow too big to fit in the narrow passages; we also witness as he is injured and worries about whether he will be able to work with his injury because ‘time off for illness’ isn’t something his owner/patron will tolerate. Nailer is spared the decision of whether to work with his injury when he stumbles upon his ‘lucky strike’ (more on luck in a minute) – an opportunity for enough money to leave the city in which his fate (to work until he dies) is predetermined. The novel explores at length the luxuries – material and psychological – that come with wealth, not the least of which is access to transport (call it ‘mobility’ if you want the double play on social standing and geographic movement).

2. The tension between luck/fate and choice: Nailer is the son of an abusive father. He is witness and subject to all sorts of violences. All the while, he, his friends and his community put great store in ‘fates’ – to the extent that the fates ought to be appeased with offerings when good ‘luck’ occurs in order to prevent the opposite. When Nailer makes his significant ‘lucky strike’ his friend, Pima, advises him to kill in order to secure the prize. Nailer, unwilling to kill, makes a deliberate choice that is – according to Pima and his context – contrary to expectation. The novel places the idea of predetermination and choice in tension not to suggest these ideas are polarities, but rather to explore the ways the characters travel between positions and struggle to test the limits of both epistemologies.

3. The consequences of resource extraction/consumption on global warming (and the dangers of genetic modifications): The novel is set in the dystopic-future after the floods, droughts and cataclysmic storms of global warming have destroyed infrastructure and government, and rising sea levels have redrawn not just the maps, but the social, political and economic landscapes. As Nailer and co. make their way though the different plot points, and as the different thematic questions are explored, underpinning it it all is this setting of grim disease, pollution and danger wrought by the setting. A setting, the novel takes some pains to remind us, that is the consequence of human greed and over-dependence on non-renewable resources (with some direct links back to income inequality). Hybrid species of part-human/part-dog (or tiger) move through this world – and demand agency (or not) – in fascinating and complicated ways (with some direct links back to fate and choice).

So there you go. Call the YA genre simplistic if you like. Deride those who read it for lacking sophisticated taste or a willingness to engage with complex questions. Or consider each book on its own merits for what it offers each reader. Which is not to say that I liked Ship Breaker. I didn’t really. But even while I don’t want to gush about how much fun it was to read, there are certainly complex ideas at work in the novel well worth exploring for readers of all ages.

P.S. Someone lent me this one and I can’t (at all) remember who recommended it and lent it. SO – if this is your book, let me know and you can have it back, and also: thanks for sending it my way!

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June 2, 2014 · 10:04 pm

A Handful of Time: YA comfort food

I lost my book this weekend (don’t worry I found it under a coat in the car). While it was lost,  my partner left the country (he’ll be back), my sister had a baby (not so much upsetting as overwhelming) and I didn’t get the job (though I didn’t expect to, disappointment is disappointment). Heady times for this reader. Hardly a time to be book-less. Time, you might think, to turn to the failsafe: the young adult fiction bookshelf (and yes, it has its own bookshelf).

Among the Beverly Clearly (there is a lot of Beverly), Gordon Korman and E.B. White I found my Kit Pearson collection. Pearson, if you’re not familiar (you should be – go get her) is a Canadian author made famous (or Canadian famous) for The Guests of War trilogy – a series that follows British Home Children (British children sent to live in Canada for the duration of WWII) – and for her Newbery winner A Handful of Time. While I remembered loving – and reading and re-reading – the Guest of War, I couldn’t remember – at all – reading A Handful of Time. I sort of thought maybe it was the same as Tuck Everlasting? You know how sometimes YA gets confused in your mind as just one big happy bit of comfort read?

Anyway, much to my delight I don’t think I’d *ever* read (or at least I have no memory of reading) A Handful of Time. And so the story unfolded like so much delightful discovery mixed with comfort and reassurance (something inherent to the genre? I’m beginning to wonder). Our protagonist is lonely, misunderstood and awkward (*cough* not at all like anyone I know or feel like). She encounters a setting – family cottage – and characters – family members – who exacerbate her feelings of lonely-awkward. And then! As if by design she discovers something (only a little magical) that allows her to understand herself better, to grow into her sense of being, to communicate who she is and what she wants: to become her better self. It is the kind of reminder and lesson every 29-year-something (I’ll refuse 30-something as long as I can) should get: that the scale of our problems  and challenges may feel monumental (“I don’t know how to steer a canoe!” or “I can’t afford to retire! ever!”) but the resilience we need to meet and grow through these challenges can be accessible to us if we think to ask, or look within.

Of course this is a problematic trajectory for the many, many kids who don’t have that kind of support network. Who don’t have ways or means to look within to find that strength and fortitude. Who meet challenges only to be met by a challenge they can’t meet. And I don’t mean to diminish these by saying, just read some YA and it will all be okay.

I just mean to say that sometimes in reading these stories – and this was certainly the case for me this weekend – by reading this story it was okay. I was comforted by the familiarity and associations of the reading practice: quiet, bathtub, introspection. I was comforted by the narrative itself: challenges overcome! I was comforted by the genre that allowed this reader to recall that the feeling of being misunderstood isn’t confined to our teenage years, that we continue to need the reminder that this, too, is shaping who we are. And that often it just sucks. And is hard. And lonely.

Less lonely, I guess, when you have a brilliant author like Pearson who gives you a story and a character to fall in with, to live with and to triumph with – if only in its pages.

(aside: when did ‘resilience’ become the catch-word for kids?)

 

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April 14, 2014 · 11:16 am

Eleanor and Park: Why did I like it so much?

In contrast to my experience reading Vernon God Little, here’s my post about Eleanor and Park that has been languishing as a draft (no memory or writing this! evidence that it’s important for me to blog or else I’ll forget it all!)

If novels are supposed to connect us to stories outside and beyond ourselves, they are also supposed to help us illuminate truths about our own experience that we might not properly understand (or have allowed ourselves to think too much about). Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park did the latter for me. Even while the novel details experiences I definitely did not have — falling/being in love as a teenager, listening to and appreciating music (I do have a distinct memory of being in grade eight and willing myself to listen to the radio thinking that I’d fit in better if I could sing ‘Barbie Girl’ with the rest of the girls in my class), growing up in an abusive household — its exploration of what it is and feels like to doubt yourself, to doubt your worth/love-ability resonated across both characters.

And… that’s where the draft ends. So… in one of the less-awesome posts I’ve ever written (and about one of the more-awesome books I’ve ever read) I’ll leave it at this. With opportunity to revise if I ever manage to get my little book club together (this is meant to be our first book).

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February 10, 2014 · 7:50 pm

Divergent and Insurgent: Reading for Pleasure and Diminishing Returns

Seldom have I been so excited about a book while reading it and then so utterly disappointed by its conclusion. So it was with Vernoica Roth’s *Divergent* and then *Insurgent*. I have no comment on the final book in the trilogy because I won’t be reading it. Why did I bother with the second, you ask? Well, I was so captivated by the first half of *Divergent* that I went and bought the second book and lest I be one to squander my (tiny) book buying budget, I had to read the second out of deference to Not Wasting Book Money. The gap between my enthusiasm and my eventual feeling about the book is hard to retrospectively bridge. That is to say, it’s hard to find something good to say about the series when I now have so many complaints, but I *must* have found something worthy and exciting if I was willing to pay for it (note: I am not library-monogamous, just library-preferential).

So what did I enjoy? The world-building aspects of this series are terrific. Like The Night Circus, the physical space imagined by the novel is captivating. So, too, the initial characterization of Tris (a characterization that takes a decided turn for the wooden and flat as she reacts and acts without any consequence to character development) and her confusion of what and who she is. The mystery elements: where are we in time and space? What kinds of cultural, social, political forces are at work? What’s the allegory here? compel the reader to keep reading with an urgency and a pleasure often misplaced in Literature that wants to slow you down enough to savour each word or sentence.

Reading *Divergent* was certainly an exercise in reading for pleasure. In much of my graduate and undergraduate discussions of literature outside the classroom my peers expressed discomfort or disbelief that “reading for pleasure” might even be possible. Having such extensive training in being critics,  how, they wondered, might it be possible to turn this critical eye “off” long enough to enjoy a book? Trained to say “no” and “but,” (how) could we allow for appreciation and commendation? I suppose I could argue that the two aren’t mutually exclusive: it is possible to find pleasure and retain critical faculties. I think I could also argue that books get read – or we read – with different intents and purposes. That the same book can be read by the same reader with different foci and attention. Putting aside the precision and attention of close reading and allowing – or abdicating? – attention to the pleasures of plot and character might well be possible (I think they are). It’s tempting to be self-depricating and say I was just a poor critic, unable to notice that worth being critical. But I’m not: I’m a good reader. So I suppose it’s an argument for the dialectic: that a reader can take pleasure from a text and simultaneously be aware of its problematic bits. *Divergent* has troublesome politics, Tris and Four have an imbalanced sexual relationship and her gender gets worked out and worked over in disturbing ways, choice and freedom get bizarrely dichotomized against violence and power.

So if it’s true that I could enjoy *Divergent* and still be aware of its problematic politics, when did I stop enjoying it altogether? I’m tempted to say it was when Four’s named turned to Tobias and I stopped being able to remember him as a sexy and mysterious instructor and could only think of him as a predatory creep, but I think it’s more basic: I stopped enjoying *Divergent* and I disliked all of *Insurgent* because the writing was bad. Really, really bad. Written for a movie and without the subtlety to pretend otherwise kind of bad. Written without the attention of an editor bad. Written as if the reader might not have ever read anything else before bad. BAD. Which is not to say that *Insurgent* doesn’t have its share of ideological issues, just that before the reader can start to think about those she has to get past the terrible writing, lack of character development and uninteresting plot. It will make a terrific movie, I’m sure, because it was written to one.

I almost wrote “Avoid both,” but I don’t think I should. *Divergent* is pure pleasure. Read it and enjoy. Just don’t – for the love of God (and boy does Veronica Roth love God – capital G) bother with the second or third.

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