The Unreal Deal

Move over, Holden Caulfield. There’s a new breed of teen heroes in town. In fact, there’s been such a shift in young adults’ reading tastes that all of us are scrambling to figure out what truly appeals to teens. Of one thing I’m certain: instead of craving realistic stories about people like themselves, today’s teens are crazy about characters (and scenarios) that have little in common with their own everyday lives. As one young reader put it, his peers are hunting for novels that will “take them away to another world, not like this one.”

To appreciate how radical a departure that is from years past, consider for a moment J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (Little, Brown, 1951), the book that established the formula for young adult novels. In Salinger’s prickly first-person account, an unreliable, alienated, and confused adolescent narrator reveals a severe trauma he has faced. Then, having confessed his deepest secrets and now able to cope with the world, he moves painfully to a better future. Salinger’s story became so popular that everyone believed that was the only type of fiction teens wanted to read. John Knowles took up the mantle eight years later with A Separate Peace (Macmillan, 1959). Even now, novels as disparate and as well executed as John Green’s Looking for Alaska (Dutton, 2005), Rob Thomas’s delightfully quirky Rats Saw God (S & S, 1996), and Laurie Halse Anderson’s heart-wrenching Speak (Farrar, 1999) rely on the same basic recipe. The traumas change, but the narrative remains the same. Salinger cast a long shadow, and many young adult authors are still living in it.

If you have any doubts, take a peek at “Create Your Own Young Adult Novel”, a Web page created by children’s book authors David Lubar and Dian Curtis Regan. It provides would-be writers with the following plot: “As the story opens, the main character is in ___ because he/she___. On the advice of his/her___, he/she is___ about the traumatic past, during which his/her___ tragically___. While recording these events, he/she meets a ___ who is even worse off [than] the main character and soon ___, helping the main character realize that life___.” Although funny, this outline unfortunately describes far too many young adult books published in the decades after The Catcher in the Rye.

Over the next 45 years, young adult fiction got trapped in an increasingly shrinking universe—one that might be called “problem novelitis.” Fiction served as bibliotherapy for troubled teens, helping them sort out a variety of issues—everything from angst to alienation. And as young adult novels became more and more predictable, they grew moribund and lost readers. Soon, few YA writers could get published, and most of those who did were greeted with pitiful advances and paltry print runs. Even YA literature’s strongest advocates worried if these books had any future. Then, all at once—quicker than you could say “quidditch”—everything began to change.

In 1997 (a year later in the United States), an obscure British writer launched the most successful series of books since Gutenberg invented movable type. In creating the character of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling made an artistic decision that dramatically changed the course of young adult novels: Harry would age a year in each of the series’ seven projected volumes. Suddenly, the world’s best-selling books featured, of all things, a teenager—and their zippy plots and lovable characters showed a healthy disregard for the stale conventions of young adult fiction. Teens, of course, went wild over Harry, treating him (and his creator) like a rock star. Thousands of young people held late-night vigils outside of bookstores, eager to be among the first to get their hands on each new volume. As writers and publishers responded to Rowling’s dizzy success, young adult novels experienced a Lazarus-like resurrection.

The prospects for young adult books look completely different today than they did a decade ago. Staggering advances of $150,000 to $250,000 are reportedly being paid to fledgling writers, and it seems like YA publishers are announcing first printings of 20,000 to 100,000 copies almost daily. Even if those figures are inflated to hype sales, they still look healthy. The door appears wide open for new voices, and last year marked the debut of many talented young adult novelists, including Matt de la Peña (Ball Don’t Lie), Laura Whitcomb (A Certain Slant of Light), Joseph Delaney (The Witch’s Apprentice), Peter Abrahams (Down the Rabbit Hole), and Alisa Libby (The Blood Confession), to name just a few. The number and diversity of young adult titles have never been greater.

Because of all the changes in young adult books, I recently attempted to provide a guide for the perplexed, 500 Great Books for Teens (Houghton, 2006). Since I’m always searching for books that combine literary quality with reader appeal, I polled hundreds of teens across the country to discover their 10 favorite books. After examining the responses and poring over the sales figures of newly published titles, I’m convinced that there’s been an amazing shift in teens’ reading habits in the last five years. Rather than wanting to read about real teenagers—as S. E. Hinton insisted they did in the 1960s—today’s adolescents are flocking to fantasy, suspense, and mystery and to writers like Dan Brown, John Grisham, Brian Jacques, Rowling, Cornelia Funke, Philip Pullman, and J. R. R. Tolkien. These readers adore superstar Christopher Paolini, who while still a teen wrote Eragon (Knopf, 2003), the first volume of his Inheritance Trilogy, with its Tolkien-inspired world. Although realistic novels like Speak and Walter Dean Myers’s Monster (Amistad, 1999) show up occasionally on teens’ lists, the vast majority prefer genre fiction to realistic problem novels. At one point, desperately seeking realistic novels to include in my book, I got excited because a lot of teens seemed to be listing Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (Random, 1993) as one of their favorites. However, on closer inspection, the title in question turned out to be R. A. Salvatore’s The Thousand Orcs (Wizards of the Coast, 2002)—which, by the way, is no A Thousand Acres.

Another major shift in teen reading involves the origin of their favorite writers. Many of the most beloved young adult authors no longer happen to be Americans. They’re now an international crew that includes Jaclyn Moriarty, Garth Nix, and Markus Zusak of Australia; Kenneth Oppel of Canada; Funke of Germany; and Jacques, Terry Pratchett, Pullman, Rowling, Jonathan Stroud, and Tolkien of England. These writers offer many different styles and voices, but they all hold the same central belief: young adults want and deserve strong characters and compelling stories. So forget the traumas and get ready for spell-binding, page-turning narratives. The protagonists of these novels aren’t the geeky, jerky teens who sit across the aisle in class. They’re characters who are thrown into extreme circumstances and exhibit amazing heroism. (Graphic novels, by the way, also mirror this trend.) In other words, these protagonists aren’t the people teenagers actually are or know—they’re the ones they wish they could be.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that young adults often prefer books not specifically written with them in mind—titles such as Girl with a Pearl Earring or To Kill a Mockingbird. That’s why editors of adult books are frantically searching for crossover books that feature young adult protagonists, best sellers such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Random, 2003), Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (Viking, 2002), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Harcourt, 2002), Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (Atria, 2004), and Anita Shreve’s Light on Snow (Little, Brown, 2004). One even gets the feeling that writers of adult fiction are now being urged by their editors to throw in a young adult heroine or two, as Elizabeth Kostova did in her recent blockbuster, The Historian (Little, Brown, 2005)—which, incidentally, makes the library profession look sexier than any book has in years.

As might be expected, not everything is utterly rosy in today’s YA world. With an increasing number of YA titles being published today comes a considerable amount of marginal works. And, unfortunately, it’s these “Grade B” novels that often attract the most publicity. The mainstream media seems to delight in presenting what is contemptible, rather than what is praiseworthy, in young adult books. For instance, everyone—except teens, that is—desperately wanted to discuss The Rainbow Party, a novel that trumpets adolescent promiscuity. Given the explosion of quality young adult fiction, this negative news coverage is tilted dramatically in the wrong direction. (Bad books for teens, of course, are nothing new. They’ve been around since those dismissible romances of the 1940s and 1950s.) Also, regrettably, critics and award committees still favor Salinger-like clones rather than the more innovative and exciting fiction that’s being written today. Possibly that will change over time.

Apart from those caveats, anyone who loves young adult literature has reason to celebrate in 2006. We are experiencing the richest outpouring of books with young adult heroes and heroines in our history. No matter what kinds of books a teen prefers—graphic novels, chick lit, romance, fantasy, historical fiction—there are many superb selections to choose from. Young adult literature has finally moved out of Salinger’s formidable shadow and come into its own.