"It Was Called Shakespeare"

Birchfield Studios 2011

Thanks to social media, I stumbled upon an interesting article in NPR's Monkey See blog, by Linda Holmes, Seeing Teenagers As We Wish They Were: The Debate Over YA Fiction. I feel that Holmes nailed this article! If you are in the LIS field, please take a moment to check it out. Feel free to comment or inbox me (jcbrown at wayne dot edu) your thoughts.

The following consists of my thoughts and reflections:
I love this: "(I also took an entire class in high school were we read books about killing your family, double suicide, drowning, being murdered in your bed ... it was called "Shakespeare," I believe.)"

Particularly well-stated:

Banning is banning, not guidance, and if the suggestion is that that's the parenting role, it has to be done ... regretfully, I think. Even for parents acting with regard to their own kids, the act of one human being actually preventing another human being from reading a book is a grave decision. Obviously, not everything is appropriate for every audience — nobody is suggesting you give Twilight to your seven-year-old. (Or, really, to anyone, although that's more because of the quality of the writing than because the themes are too dark.) But stopping — actually stopping — a YA reader from picking up a particular book because it describes behavior you don't want him to emulate potentially cuts him off from something that might reach him in exchange for ... nothing, really, except your own comfort level.

Much of this concern comes from a very well-intentioned place, I think. Parents hate the collision of their children with unpleasantness. Everyone wishes life as a teenager were irreconcilable with having an interest in angry, psychologically complicated, perhaps violent characters. Nobody wants to think their kid can really relate to a teenage protagonist who considers suicide or gets beaten up at school or feels crushed by pressure to be perfect. It feels good to make those "adult" themes, but that doesn't make it so.