Young Adult Books are Not Children’s Books
As much as I love to quibble about definitions,
I’m already long winded, and it’s beside the point. Are teenagers children?
What ages are young adult books aimed towards? I once even read a Facebook post
by an indie author claiming that young adult books weren’t named for the age of
the audience, but the characters’, just after reading the first Game of Thrones book. When it comes to genres and marketing, there’s
not exactly official rules as to what constitutes as what.
If you don’t know me or my current predicament, one
of my current struggles is the question whether or not I am a young adult
writer.
I did a great deal of my writing as a teenager,
highly influenced by young adult books and my own mind. To this day there are
tropes, themes, and styles that naturally appeal to me. However, as I’ve said
many times before, I never liked being talked down to, and often felt my
teenage books didn’t push their plots or stakes or intellectual challenges far
enough for my liking.
I’ve met with agents in casual settings along with
writers and a few editors and have been told, upon explaining my uncertainty as
to where my books fall in genre land, that yes, my voice has a higher level of
sophistication than what you’d expect for a young adult novel.
I braced against pitching my work as young adult as
well due to the constant insistence that my readers need my work dumbed down
for them. I’ve been told numerous times, “I understood it, I just don’t think
anyone else will.” For a wide variety of reasons, I find this criticism to be
inaccurately dismissive, but still just as frustrating. I don’t try to be
confusing, but I don’t have any intention on being condescending either.
While driving my things from Wyoming to New York
City, I finally finished up my A Wise
Man’s Fear audio book. The sequel to Patrick Rothfuss’s widely praised
novel, The Name of the Wind, the
adult fantasy novel has some excellent writing in the ignorable, noninvasive
sense.
Many people advise authors to fixate on immersion
over prose, and writing a scene that paints the world without distracting the
audience to the words themselves takes colossal skill while looking like it was
effortless. Despite my assertion that not all books benefit from this immersive
style, I cannot praise Rothfuss’s ability enough.
After it was over, my mother and I sought out
another audio book out in the boonies of Nebraska. We were offered one by our
friendly Walmart, Miss Peregrine’s Home
for Peculiar Children. This wasn’t the first time I’d compared Rothfuss
with a young adult writer, and it became a lot harder to ignore the myriad of
criticisms I’ve heard about the young adult genre period and the masses’
presumption about authors of young adult books lacking in skill.
At the time, I was still recovering from my break
up at the beginning of the summer, though each day the weight lifted off of me
as I begin to forget the good and bad and start getting excited for the future.
In any case, I can attest that my disinterest in the last few young adult books
I’d read has at least a little to do with my inability to romanticize romance
and all of the negative associations reminding me of how small and disappointed
I felt throughout the last two years. Also, due to my stress and depression, I
struggled to enjoy anything period, all to give credit to the three young adult
authors who I found lacking in the last three months.
But Peculiar
Children irritated me in clear, cut ways the other two did not.
I went in expecting to enjoy it, but had to stop
the tape several times to rant.
I suppose my biggest criticism I have towards any book—and perhaps why it irritates me so much when someone tells me to, and I quote, “Dumb down my work”—is when the author doesn’t trust the reader.
The first half of the book is waiting for the
protagonist to catch up with the audience. We know, for a lot of reasons, from
the beginning that the “peculiars” are really, yes, actually magical and his
grandfather telling him the stories is not insane. The protagonist, of course,
doesn’t know that for certain, and goes out on an adventure to prove their
existence (or at least find some closure.) The story takes a great deal of time
until he actually comes across the home, and it’s truly not that interesting.
Mostly because you know magic is real as there would be nowhere to go with the
story if it wasn’t, and because the book followed a pretty common young adult
formula in multiple ways. In fact, while I argue a good book does not have to
be original, the ideas the author presented weren’t especially wondrous, the
style not especially personable, the plot not particularly tense, the theme not
particularly meaningful, and the characters not particularly memorable.
In fact, Jake the protagonist is thoroughly
unlikable and fairly dense. Unbelievably stupid in some parts. I would say that
the author portrayed a teenager genuinely in attitude and desires, but not a
teenager anyone would want to be around. As for his—and everyone else’s
conclusions—he seemed really slow on the uptake, such as when he suddenly had
the epiphany that he could use his phone as a flashlight! The way the author
described his excitement at the idea was laughable. It wasn’t the only time
either that I was waiting for the character to catch up to me, and, as I said,
reading half a book on him trying to prove something you already know is true
is incredibly boring.
The narration didn’t help either, and I have to
wonder if the character’s stupidity had to do with the slow, measured way the
actor spoke. I was highly disappointed with his reading after hearing the
immersive voice acting in A Wiseman’s
Fear. All of the characters sounded the same—boy and girl alike—he paused
at strange places, spoke incredibly slowly, and enunciated things like a
librarian reading a picture book to five-year-olds might. In fact, I think a
great deal of the condescension and the character’s denseness came from the
reader’s tone of voice over the writer’s.
I think the strange pauses was actually a
successful attempt to cold read, the actor catching up with his thoughts. You
could hear the theatrical direction in the way he spoke; raising your voice at
the end of a sentence instead of letting it drop off is a common actor’s note.
But this made it seem like Jake was asking questions a great deal of the time,
like he was shocked almost, when really his conclusions should’ve been obvious.
MY grandfather, who grew up in the
home for peculiar children might be a peculiar?! Oh, he was, “like me?” Well,
I’m going to promptly forget about that intentionally obtuse answer so I can
spend two pages figuring out the cliche and simplistic principles of time
travel.
HAVE YOU NEVER WATCHED A SCI-FI FILM, JAKE?!
The voice actor hadn’t practiced, didn’t know what
was going to come next, and that was actually sort of impressive, but it didn’t
do the stories any favors. Mostly though, him getting really excited over inane
things, exaggerating and instilling a gasp into his voice to really punctuate
his words and energy, was trying too hard to be entertaining and ignoring the
fact that this book—filled with swear words and teenage characters—was meant
for people 15-20, not kindergarteners.
In fact, as I complained, my mother said, “Well,
this is a book for children…”
No, it isn’t. Why do people keep saying that?
I will admit, people give children little credit
anyway. They’re much smarter than we think they are, much more capable, and
take in more than we know. But besides that, teenagers aren’t children—not
exactly. Sure, I’ve worked with sixteen-year-olds, I’ve seen the difference
between 18 and 23, and I realize that writing a book to keep the interest of a teenager
isn’t always going to be the same as someone who just hit thirty—in fact,
that’s what some of this post is about. I am getting older, and perhaps the
focus of my interest is now different. Perhaps I’ve read too many similar books
by this point and am looking for something new. Perhaps my negativity is still
getting to me more than I thought. Perhaps I think too much like a writer
predicted it from a meta standpoint. Perhaps I’m too no-nonsense these days.
Perhaps it is a thousand times better with the pictures. All possibilities.
But young adult books are not “children’s books.”
They do not need to be dumbed down to get ornery
little idiots to pay attention. Adults don’t need to be ashamed for reading
them in public. Writers aren’t off the hook just because kids are more
accepting and less grumpy. I think the author missed the mark because he had
some pretty interesting ideas shoved into the background in favor of showcasing
the stereotype of EVERYTEEN PORTALS INTO MAGICAL SCHOOL. Why not tell the grandfather’s
story: a polish boy fleeing from the Nazis and stumbling into a school for
“peculiar” children? That seems far more interesting than rich Florida teen
goes on vacation to enter into magical world.
I often ask myself why I feel a pull against young
adult novels when it is the first part of the bookstore I head to. Is it
because of snobbery? I hope not. But if I’m going to write what I want, then the
insistence that I must overexplain things, that I write about the Everyteen in
Modernopolis meeting Manic Pixie Dream Monster, and have adults feel shame for
being interested, it makes me think I don’t belong in that world anymore.
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