Crossing Over

A materials selector looks at adult books for teen readers

By Angelina Benedetti -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2004

As a librarian who purchases and recommends books for teens, I am asked what makes an adult book appeal to YA readers? Where do the teens find them? I find it ironic that as an adult I earn my living selecting teen materials. As a teen, I would not read a "young adult" book unless someone forced me.

Instead, I cruised the adult fiction collection, in search of books that would appeal to me. I read the latest bestsellers, with that familiar fondness for Stephen King, and books that were being made into movies. A teacher I loved recommended Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear (Turtleback, 1980). Scanning the book bins at the local Goodwill, I stumbled upon to the works of John Irving. When my junior high librarian saw me carrying a battered copy of The World According to Garp (Ballantine, 1990), she told me, "You'd better reread that when you're thirty."

In the heyday of the Oprah book club, I would walk into a junior high classroom and see similarly battered copies of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone (Pocket, 1993) and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (HarperCollins, 1998). I now know what my librarian meant. In every generation there are teens who, like me, would not deign to browse the teen collection.

As with any readers' advisory interaction, appeal lies with the individual reader. I believe it is a mistake to assume that teens interested in adult books "aren't getting" what they read. They are reading them with teen eyes. They may understand something differently than you or me, but they get it nonetheless. Over time, I have developed a method to gauge a book's potential appeal. Does it answer the questions that young people may be asking? Does it address two or more adolescent developmental tasks?

Take my earlier example of The Poisonwood Bible. On the surface, this story of a missionary gone mad in the turbulent political landscape of the Congo does not look like it would hold teen interest. However, the book addresses—in its plot, themes, and narration—several adolescent developmental tasks. The strongest characters in the book are the missionary's daughters. These girls struggle, in different ways, to achieve emotional independence from their parents. They determine for themselves what is right and what is wrong. Two of the daughters have romantic relationships. The political struggle in the Congo awakens their social and political awareness. Ultimately, they grow into people very different from their parents, and one another.

There are other titles that on the surface would seem to be a perfect fit for teens, but which are really beyond their interests developmentally. A local high school assigns books set in the Pacific Rim and invited me to booktalk young adult and adult titles. Try as I might, I could not get a teen to finish J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun (Washington Square, 1985), in which a British boy survives life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Far more popular was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (Broadway, 1998). Where Ballard's book has a dreamlike quality appropriate to his character's dissociation from the war around him, O'Brien's book transports readers immediately and brutally into the combat zone. The young soldiers are defining themselves, forming compelling peer relationships, enduring physical challenges, and struggling with issues of right and wrong.

The Young Adult Library Services Association's "Best Books for Young Adults" committee is charged with selecting the best adult and young adult books of any given year. It is interesting to note that despite its popularity, The Poisonwood Bible did not make the list the year it was published. Two books originally published for the adult market were selected for the committee's 2004 Best Books for Young Adults Top Ten. They were Joyce Maynard's The Usual Rules (St. Martin's, 2003) and Craig Thompson's Blankets (Top Shelf, 2003). The third, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Doubleday, 2003), was published for teens in its native Britain, but published for adults here. Other adult books on the BBYA 2004 list were Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin, 2003), Judith Ortiz Cofer's The Meaning of Consuelo (Farrar, 2003), Amanda Davis's Wonder When You'll Miss Me (Morrow, 2003), Barbara Freese's Coal: A Human History (Perseus, 2002), Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor (Riverhead, 2002), Karin Lowachee's Burndive (Warner, 2003), and Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Norton, 2003).

All eight of the above titles present situations where their teen protagonists redefine and redirect the relationships with the adults in their lives. In The Usual Rules, Wendy turns to her wayward father when her mother dies in the World Trade Center disaster. Burndive is a science-fiction adventure in which a teen celebrity is at odds with both of his famous parents. Purple Hibiscus is reminiscent of The Poisonwood Bible both because it takes place in Africa and because it presents a daughter challenging her religiously tyrannical father.

Fiction provides a safe place for teens to examine their values through another's experiences. In Wonder When You'll Miss Me, the victim of a gang rape brutally attacks one of the boys who held her down. The book explores the aftermath of the rape and its violent consequences. Craig Thompson's graphic novel Blankets confronts the very big issues of faith and love. Craig is a loner who falls in love with Raina, whom he meets at church camp. Their relationship at first affirms his faith, then calls it into question, then destroys it, and ultimately rebuilds it on a different foundation. The two nonfiction titles on the list cause readers to question their assumptions. Coal tracks the use of a valuable resource over time. In its final chapters, its author asks if coal is an environmentally sound choice for the future. Stiff deals with a subject that makes many of us squeamish, confronting our values about life, death, and the hereafter. Of course, the gross-out factor is also responsible for its popularity.

The mention of the "gross out" leads me to address the appeal of the horror genre, which touches on more developmental needs than one might initially think. What is it about Stephen King's books that lead otherwise reluctant readers to stay awake at night finishing hundreds upon hundreds of pages? Looking at his books through a developmental lens, one discovers that most of King's heroes act alone (fostering emotional independence) or come together as a group (forming peer relationships). They face very direct challenges, either from an evil entity from without (vampires, killer cars, and dead pets) or from an evil brewing within. Horror also speaks to the discomfort teens have with the physical challenges of puberty. The title character in King's Carrie (1975) comes into her destructive telekinetic powers after her first period. In Danse Macabre (1983, both Turtleback), his nonfiction book about horror, King analyzes the popularity of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, starring Michael Landon. He reasons that a zit is a minor thing compared to sprouting fur and going on a killing spree.

Celebrity biographies are also popular with young adults. I was booktalking one day at a middle school and spied a huddle of guys congregated at the library door. Were they playing with a new Game Boy? No. One had bought the new Mick Foley wrestling biography, Mankind: Have a Nice Day! (ReganBooks, 1999). He had read all 500-plus pages in one night and was sharing the good parts. A mix of teen girls and their moms recently packed an auditorium where hunky Ty Pennington, of TV's Trading Spaces, was promoting his new remodeling book.

Teens, like adults, find out about books via word of mouth–whether through the words or the mouths of friends, parents, or the media. When I came to my position as Teen Materials Selector for the King County Library System, I asked for a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. Along with Us, People, and Rolling Stone, it takes the pulse of popular culture. Six of the 10 adult books that made the Best Books list in 2004 were reviewed in Entertainment Weekly. On occasion, the magazine will recommend a young adult title, as evidenced by its March 26th "A-" review of Meg Cabot's Princess in Pink (HarperCollins, 2004).

The same issue of Entertainment Weekly pointed to another source for book titles: television. Shows aimed at teens have featured both graphic novels and titles as varied as John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (on One Tree Hill) and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (on The O.C.). The Oprah book club may have moved from popular fiction to classics, but teens can still find books on the air.

Whether to foster their developmental needs or to feed their curiosity about the world, adult books will continue to be sought out and devoured by teens. While I know that someday I will yield to the suggestion of my junior high librarian and reread the adult books I loved years ago, thirty has come and gone and The World According to Garp still needs a second read. When I come back to it, I know that I will find a different book than the one I remember, a book colored by my adult experiences. That thing that drew me to adult books as a teen is what draws me to young adult books now, the desire to connect with characters that are real to me. As a teen, I longed for some insight into the adult world, something that would help me comprehend the changes that were going on around and inside me. As an adult, I want to read about teens in that same struggle.