Keeping It Real

Nobody spots a fake faster than teen readers. Manipulate or preach, inject personal agenda or resort to stereotypes, and the chance to touch readers is gone, the book tossed aside.

Nobody embraces authenticity like teen readers, either. The protagonist caught between belief and doubt, grappling with personal change in a shifting environment, is welcomed as a friend and claimed as a role model. The casts of these recent young adult novels range from inner city toughs to small-town girls, wallflower nerds to teenage drag queens, all genuinely portrayed and authentically voiced. Their language is often raw, their sexual ethics may be casual, and their stories are seldom pretty. These complex characters live in the messy tension between what is and what should be.

Ironically, sophomore Tom Henderson, deemed a loser by his classmates, rejects just such an authentic character in his disdain for J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Frank Portman’s King Dork (Delacorte, 2006). Tom can’t escape The Catcher in the Rye at school. “It’s kind of like a cult. They live for making you read it,” he gripes. Notations in his deceased father’s copy of the book lead Tom to unravel an interlocking series of mysteries, but his self-deprecating, scathingly witty digressions about inventing band names, surviving high school, and obsessing over girls, interspersed with literary criticism and sundry wry commentary, let Tom’s voice glitter and gouge. Pair King Dork with Catcher as intriguing companion reads, and dig into their questions about an impersonalizing education system and the value of the individual.

The protagonist of Barry Lyga’s The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Houghton, 2006) also experiences daily humiliation and invisibility at school. Highly intelligent and socially isolated, Fanboy has a dark comic edge that hints at violence. He escapes by creating a graphic novel and forms a volatile friendship with enigmatic Goth Girl Kyra based on their mutual contempt of classmates and acute frustration with life. “The List is getting pretty long these days. It’s a compilation of everyone who’s ever pissed me off for no reason whatsoever. All of those Jock Jerks and Clique-its who treat me like dirt just because they can…I can almost sympathize with those guys who go nuts and shoot up their schools, but no one on The List is worth dying or going to jail for.” Shot through with sarcasm, Fanboy takes a hard look at bullying and self-hatred, rage, and self-discovery. Lyga coaxes Fanboy and Kyra out of their chosen shadows of social obscurity, revealing their thoughts, hurts, and motivations with empathy. Readers will wholeheartedly embrace these prickly underdogs.

American Born Chinese (First Second, 2006) by Gene Luen Yang interweaves three stories of flawed characters on the fringe in a provocative graphic-novel format. Jin Wang’s family leaves Chinatown for the white suburbs, where he is picked on and friendless; popular blond Danny is mortified by his visiting Chinese cousin, the wincingly stereotypical Chin-Kee; and in a retold Chinese fable, the Monkey King determines to be revered as a god, forsaking his humble origins. Yang’s exquisitely simple color panels, featuring spare, pointed dialogue, tie the stories together in a deft twist, raising issues of cultural dominance and relations in the United States. Use American Born and Fanboy to explore the use of the graphic-novel format in depicting serious issues such as prejudice, violence, and intergenerational conflicts over ethnicity in contemporary American culture.

Mainstreamed Jean, 17, who has “never let cerebral palsy hold her back,” encounters a diverse cast of disabled teens at Camp Courage in Harriet McBryde Johnson’s Accidents of Nature (Holt, 2006), set in 1970. Fiercely perceptive and creative Sara, who must use a wheelchair to get around, sidelines herself even among these peers, choosing to “Say it loud, 'I’m crippled and proud!’” and eschewing any hint of “norm” condescension with caustic comments. Her subversive behavior and irreverent wit introduce Jean to a new level of personal empowerment. Johnson imbues her characters with vibrant personalities and unflinchingly portrays the uncomfortable details of daily life with a disability. Consider how life has changed for the disabled since 1970 in terms of physical accommodation and social acceptance. Discuss all four titles’ use of humor, character exaggeration, and black comedy in addressing social isolation, stereotyping, and bullying.

For teens targeted by family members or acquaintances, abuse can be physical, emotional, sexual, or verbal, ongoing or isolated, outright or insidious, in surroundings affluent or desperate. Strong first-person narration intensifies their stories’ impact, putting readers behind the victim’s eyes, making them privy to raw reactions and entangling confusion.

Constant fear and danger mark the lives of Matt, 17, and his younger sisters Callie and Emmy. Their unpredictable, psychotic mother’s rage flares out of control without warning, scarring them physically and emotionally. Hope glimmers when her ex-boyfriend, harboring his own violent secrets, risks involvement, but Nancy Werlin’s The Rules of Survival (Dial, 2006) is Matt’s story. Wary with hard-won wisdom, Matt’s overriding concern for his sisters’ safety drives him to desperate measures in an intense portrayal of physical abuse, emotional torture, and sacrificial love. “The events we lived through taught me to be sure of nothing about other people… [T]here are people in this world who mean you harm. And sometimes, they’re people who say they love you.”

For a struggling student living in the projects with a stoned father and an absent addicted mother, Iggy Corso, 16, is remarkably free of self-pity in K. L. Going’s Saint Iggy (Harcourt, 2006). Born addicted to crack and suspended from school yet again, Iggy takes to heart his principal’s advice, “We can all make something of ourselves…. We can do something that contributes to the world.” Turning to sometime-mentor and pre-law dropout Mo, Iggy becomes entangled in Mo’s own drug-complicated conflicts with his wealthy parents, and events escalate to a shockingly redemptive climax. Iggy’s voice, at once sincere and sarcastic, and angry and insightful, speaks for those abused by neglect who fall through the cracks.

Nerdy Tyler Miller, busted for spraying graffiti on the school and sentenced to a summer of physical labor, suddenly sports a buff physique that attracts the attention of popular Bethany Milbury, sister of his tormentor, Chip, and daughter of his dad’s boss, in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Twisted (Viking, 2007). Awkward Tyler is caught among his tightly wound father’s verbal belittling, Chip’s pummeling, and his own out-of-control infatuation for Bethany, with liquor and burgeoning sexuality thrown into the volatile mix as well. Tight, frank writing laced with humor (“[Dad] was a dragon hiding in the skin of a small man”) lends a sardonic, erratic edge to Tyler’s narration.

At 13, Tracy shares a secure home with her doting father, while vivid memories of her deceased mother elicit a warm glow of safety. When she is brutally raped and beaten on the last day of school, she retreats into fearful repression, choosing to remain in her house obsessively playing the piano, in Susan Shaw’s Safe (Dutton, 2007). Tracy’s voice is childlike and gentle as she deliberately veers away from memories of her attack. “I erected a blank wall inside my head. Blank and white and bright and nothing on it. I wouldn’t look behind it, or next to it or above it,” she reacts in therapy. Her haltingly painful journey to confront her experience and achieve a renewed sense of security is aided by kind friends in this extraordinary glimpse into the traumatized psyche.

The jolting personal voices of these four protagonists shift readers’ attention from the horrific details of attack to the very human victim, whether shouting back in frustration or whispering in confusion. Mine these titles for takeoff points on the impact of violence on our history and current daily life.

“I make a fist and rub it into my other hand, but I really wanna put my fist through the wall. I can’t calm myself down. I can feel the blood pounding in my brain. I gotta do something. I wanna go somewhere, but I don’t got nowhere to go.” Tyrell, a dropout at 15, is stuck in a roach-infested New York City shelter with his wasted mother and little brother, caught between his girlfriend Novisha and the tantalizing Jasmine, sober and broke but tempted by the easy money of the drug trade, in Coe Booth’s Tyrell (Scholastic, 2006). Tyrell’s gritty, ghetto narration, realistically raw, follows plot twists as he works every angle at his disposal amid a strong cast of well-drawn characters and strives not to follow his father to jail. “And me, I ain’t trying to be one of them men that always gotta be looking over they shoulder for the police neither. I know if I’m with Novisha, she ain’t gonna let me end up like that. But if me and her ain’t together, I don’t know what kinda man I’ma be. I could go any ol’ way.”

Abandoned long ago by his “druggy parents,” Eric “Hustle” Samson, 17, crashes with his friend’s family and spends his days on the streets, where he hopes to trade a career in shoplifting for one in rap music. Janet McDonald’s Harlem Hustle (Farrar, 2006) portrays the hip-hop culture in all its attitude and lingo as Eric is taken in by a music producer who rips off his best rap for a pittance. Eric’s college-bound friend Jeannette introduces him to African-American poetry (“We real cool. We/Left school. We/Lurk late. We/Strike straight…”) to which he responds with his own rap (“my talk, my walk it got me marked/one look at me they call a cop/the ledge I’m on is one long drop/she look my way and light the dark...”).

The pitch-perfect language of Tyrell and Harlem Hustle crackles with life as the taut characters express frustration, sexual desire, and hopelessness punctuated with laugh-out-loud humor. Readers entering their world of certain injustice will find themselves inside the heads and hearts of these unlikely heroes, personally engaged in the courage of their moment-to-moment struggles. Grab hold of creative-writing hooks involving dialect and slang, and work rap lyrics into poetry study, delving into the richness of the language. Tyrell, in particular, lends itself to a provocative discussion of the “N” word.

Walter Dean Myers wrote What They Found: Love on 145th Street (Random, 2007) to affirm that “yes, young black people fall in love and longing the same way that everyone else does.” A collection of intertwining short stories, much of the action in What They Found swirls around the conversations at the Curl-E-Que beauty shop. A teenage mother glimpses her own beauty through the eyes of an artist. A young girl cares for her little brother and AIDS-infected mother. A teenage girl turns her addict brother in to the police when she realizes it is his only hope. A shy student tentatively tests the romantic waters with a fellow poetry lover. Myers’s affection for all of his characters is apparent, and he writes them with kindness and candor, the grace of his language not ignoring their faults but embracing their possibilities, often with pointed humor.

It is that type of respect for both characters and readers that marks each of these recent young adult novels. Moralizing is absent, story lines are complex, characters are multidimensional, and loose ends dangle. The protagonists’ voices ring with authenticity and credibility, lifting them from the printed page and engaging readers on a personal level. Invite these characters into the classroom and let them provoke real discussion!