WHY READ YAL?

Reason One: Widening the World

To say that reading can offer a broader understanding of the world, one not limited by an individual’s own experience, is something of a cliché.  In the case of young adult literature, however, this apparent truism is made freshly true, as the best of YAL introduces its readers to a complex and increasingly diverse world.  Of course the canonical literature usually taught in English classrooms can also open readers’ eyes to new ideas.  Too often, though, these books feature characters and situations years away from adolescents’ experience, requiring not only an imaginative leap but a fundamental displacement of the readers’ own concerns.  YAL, by contrast, has been written “about adolescents, with adolescent readers in mind” (Groenke and Scherff, 2) .  This makes it a powerful medium for trying on new perspectives, while staying close a recognizable point of view.  

This is particularly important when YA lit takes on the job of sharing what  Daniel Solorzano and Tara Yosso call “counter-stories,” that is, stories “of those people whose experiences are not often told” (quoted in Hughes-Hassell, 214)  These can include those seen as “other” by the majority culture because of race, ethnicity, sexuality, class or disability.  It can also include stories of traumatic experiences that can be difficult to discuss, including abuse, rape or mental illness.  Many critics rightly point out that there is still a need, particularly in multicultural and LGBT literature for young adults, to diversify the stories themselves (Younker and Webb, 198; Banks, 34).  Yet few would deny that YAL has the power to bring these “counter-stories” to life and, in so doing, to build awareness, understanding and greater empathy.

When written well, Hugh-Hassell argues, such stories serve a double function.  Readers whose experience has been marginalized may have had few opportunities to see their own lives reflected in texts.  For them, such YAL can be empowering, making them feel much less alone.  Those who are part of the majority culture can begin, though books, to “consider how the world looks" to others whose experience has been less mainstream (Hughes-Hassell, 215).  For both groups, the move from initial reading to critical questioning – asking why societal norms and expectation are as they are – can come from books that widen the world and can begin on the very first page.
 

One to try: Wonder by R.J. Palacio.

Wonder focuses on Augie Pullman, a ten-year-old boy with a severe facial deformity.  Although he has a loving family and a few supportive friends, he is now facing a huge new challenge: attending a “regular” school for the first time.  Throughout the novel, readers share Augie’s experiences, which include daily humiliations but also surprising connections and gradually developing friendships.  And Augie’s realistic, often humorous voice tells only part of the story.  Chapter by chapter, the narration shifts between Augie, his sister Via (who both adores and resents her brother), as well as several of Augie’s new classmates (most of whom eventually show that visible disabilities are only one kind of difference.)  By the end, the novel paints a broader picture of a school and a community changing in reaction to inclusion -- surprising itself with its own capacity for both casual cruelty and deep kindness. 

Reason Two: Building a Better (More Fluid) You

According to writer David Van Biema, the transition from childhood to adulthood is “a huge leap on the slimmest of information” (quoted in Donelson,1)   Indeed, as Groenke and Scherff point out, “Adolescent identities are usually in flux”(10), as friends and family relationships, school and social life all vie for teens’ attention, demanding constant decisions and shifts in identity.  These shifts are made even more complex by today's rapid changes in technology and digital means of connection.  Although the process of identity formation is an inevitable,  it is also complex, drawing on many sources, both positive and negative. And as Van Biema suggests, it can be lonely (Donelson, 1).       

The good news is that it's also a process in which reading can play a powerful – and positive -- role.  As David Sumara argues, “Reading… is an act of identity making,” and the act of reading “an important site”  for the negotiation and evolution of self (206).  By this "negotiation" Sumara means not only how adolescents think of themselves as students and as readers, but also the process by which readers use what they encounter through text to create a larger and perhaps more flexible sense of self.  Since identity emerges relationally, though interactions with others, memory and experience, but also through interpretation of events (both real and fictional) reading can be a safe and surprisingly free space to explore possibilities or to try on identities.  

What’s makes YAL even more powerful in this regard is that it so often forefronts the process of identity questioning and creation.  Even the most canonical coming of age novels a ranging from Catcher in the Rye to Huck Finn, adolescent characters question who they are and who they might become.  In a number of contemporary YA novels, however, characters add another level, reflecting metacognitively (and often with humor) about the process itself.   In so doing, they highlight the uncertainties and indeterminacies of identity – as well as the hopeful possibilities of fluidity, choice and change.   

One to try: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  

In Sherman Alexie’s first novel for young adults (based in part of autobiographical details), Arnold Spirit Jr. or “Junior” tells the story of his life on the Spokane Indian reservation and his decision to leave that reservation to attend Reardan, a predominantly white school.  In the year he describes, Junior falls in love, gains and loses friends and improves his basketball (and fistfighting) skills.  He also suffers the death of several family members and faces the poverty, alcoholism and loss of hope that are often part of life on the reservation.   Throughout, Junior’s funny, honest and sometimes heartbreaking voice – along with the cartoons he sprinkles through the text -- shows his wrestling with identity in a particularly vivid way.  Junior’s eventual realization that he is not limited to one fixed identity, but that he belongs to many “tribes” will resonate with readers far beyond the reservation.

Reason Three: Creating a Craving (for Complexity) 

Another reason to use YA literature in and out of the classroom is for its potential to build engaged and enthusiastic readers  -- readers who will continue that passionate habit throughout their lives.  As Angela Johnson writes, “YAL plays a major role in encouraging the habit and enjoyment of lifelong reading.”  She goes on to say, though, that this can only happen if students are encouraged at multiple sites, including the classroom.  After all, she says, “It takes a village…to raise a reader” (215).  

Johnson’s  work draws on theories of reader response, and the distinction made by Louise Rosenblatt between “efferent” reading, for the purpose of gaining information, and “aesthetic reading” in which the reader is “engrossed in that particular moment of time during reading” – or what we might call being “lost in a book” (quoted in Johnson, 217).  Developing this intensely absorbing aspect of reading is essential to making students WANT to read.  And too often it is not achieved in school. As Groenke and Scherff describe, there can be an enormous the gap between students' engagement with books they read for pleasure (and by choice) and the books they read in school, which too often they don’t read or read reluctantly (2). 

It’s this passionate habit (or even addiction) that YAL is so effective in helping to create -- even or especially in the classroom.   Series books from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games have clearly drawn in many new readers.  Yet, it's not only series books that have this effect.  YAL includes highly engaging and sophisticated works in a variety of genres, from memoir to historical fiction, graphic novel to novels in verse.  Building on pleasure can mean building a genuine taste for complexity – and pointing the way to a life of rich reading.

One to try: Crank by Ellen Hopkins

This riveting verse novel tells the story of Kristina (or, as she calls her alter-ego, Bree), as she leaves her stable home with her mother and spends several weeks with her semi-absent father.  During the visit, enticed by a guy she's been flirting with, Kristina/Bree gradually becomes addicted to crank or methamphetamine -- an addiction that only grows more powerful once she's returned home.  What’s striking about the book, besides is visceral and powerful descriptions of drug abuse, is its verse novel form.  The complexity of Hopkins' verse, including her repeated “mirror poems” simultaneously shows the dark side of Kristina’s devolution and the part of her that can still be saved, that longs to get back to a normal life.  Like many other verse novels now popular in YAL, Crank combines high form with intense action and emotion, making it fast-paced, intensely readable and almost impossible to put down.

Bibliography appears under Works Cited page.