Recently, an article on dark themes in young adult books in the Wall Street Journal rocked the YA community–and not in a good way. Rebuttals are popping up everywhere on blogs run by YA authors, book bloggers, and YA readers (teens and adults alike). The hashtag #yasaves is trending worldwide on twitter. Read it. It will make you cry.
Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?
The article talks about how a mom recently went into a bookstore to buy her thirteen-year-old a book and she walked out, no book in hand because there was “nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff.”
The article then goes on to condemn YA as a whole as nothing but dark, depressing schlock that’s going to make teens do horrible, terrible things.
[Read the rest of Suzanne Lazear’s post on Young Adult books over at Geekmom.]
