Young-Adult Fiction Takes A Dark Turn

Saw this piece over at The Wall Street Journal: It Was, Like, All Dark And Stormy. It talks about how young adult fiction has taken a turn for the grim. An excerpt:

Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today’s landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.

To understand this recent wave of desperation lit, it’s useful to consider the history of books read by young adults that traffic in death and cruelty and mental illness. Think of Mary going blind in “Little House on the Prairie” or the ultimate institutionalization of Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye.” Teenagers have historically shown a certain appetite for calamity; they like a little madness, sadism and disease in the books they curl up with at night.

Right now, though, the motif of impending disaster—about a job that will be lost, a house that will be foreclosed, a case of swine flu that will sweep through the nation—looms large in our culture, and it may be no coincidence that the dominant ambiance of young-adult literature should be that of the car crash about to happen.

Unsettling as it is, there is a certain amount of comfort to be gleaned from the new disaster fiction; it makes its readers feel less alone. What is striking in the response to these books is how many teenagers seem to identify with their characters, even though their experiences (suicide, car crashes, starvation, murder) would seem to place them on the outer fringes of normal life.

It might appear to adults casually perusing “Wintergirls” and “Thirteen Reasons Why” that the kids and experiences within their covers are fairly uncommon and overwrought. But it seems that the extreme and unsettling situations chronicled in these books are, for many teenagers, accurate and realistic depictions of their inner lives.

Given the grim story lines, not to mention absence of designer shoes and haircuts that readers of lighter young adult titles are accustomed to, it’s easy to assume that this new batch of young-adult books peddles despair. In fact, the genre is more uplifting than the fizzy escapism that long dominated the young adult marketplace. Today’s bestselling authors are careful to infuse the final scenes of these bleak explorations with an element of hope...