Is YA for Kids?
How a novel with F-bombs and sex gets categorized for kids.
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Your 11-year-old is reading a YA novel by bestselling author Sarah Dessen, which she found at her middle school library. You couldn’t be happier. The book is long and appears to be quite a page-turner. (Touchdown, book! iPhone trails late in the fourth.)
Here’s an excerpt:
“Damn,” he said, wiping his mouth as he passed the bottle back to me. “Since when are you such a lush?” Then he took a deep drag, sputtering slightly as he held it in. My head felt heavy, fluid, as he exhaled, the smoke blowing across me. I closed my eyes trying to lose myself in it. … “Hey,” I said, forcing my eyes open and turning my head. “Let me get a hit off that.” He held it out. As I took it, my fingers fumbled and it fell to the ground. “Shit,” I said. …I had to concentrate on guiding it to my mouth slowly, easing my lips around it before pulling in a big drag. The smoke was thick, sinking down into my lungs, and feeling it I sat back again, my head hitting the fender behind me. God, this was good… every worry receding like a wave rushing out and then pulling back, wiping the sand clean behind it. The pot was good, better than the stuff we bought, and I felt it almost instantly, the room and my brain slowly taking on a heavy, rolling haze. Suddenly, everything seemed that much more fascinating… even Marshall. He looked at me for a moment then slid his hands out, moving them up my thighs to my waist…
The passage is from Dessen’s Lock and Key, which is categorized as a novel for juveniles, or colloquially, “young adults.” Some of you are asking, Doesn’t a novel about vodka, sex, and really good pot belong in a high school library? What’s it doing in a middle school, especially when school libraries have limited shelf space and budgets?
The answer to that question is a bit like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney, where an old jalopy sends you careening into the pits of Hell: There are a lot of sharp turns and a steering wheel that spins but controls nothing.
How does a novel with unfettered F-bombs, sex, pot, and vodka get categorized for juveniles? According to the American Library Association, if the main character in the book is between the ages of 12-18, then the book is categorized as Young Adult. So if the sex, vodka, and pot are happening to someone in that age range, you’ve got yourself a YA book.
Take The DUFF, by Kody Keplinger: “Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush, who calls Bianca the Duff — the Designated Ugly Fat Friend — of her crew.” (Publisher’s summary.) I came across The DUFF in the Young Adult section of my local library, right next to The Giver by Lois Lowry, which my daughter’s fifth-grade teacher read to the class (and is now one of my daughter’s all-time favorites).
An excerpt from The DUFF:
Wesley’s hand slid beneath the waistband of my pants, his fingers moving lower and lower… I bit my lip to keep from gasping as Wesley’s fingers slipped to places that made my knees shake. I could feel the smirk on his lips as they moved to my ear. As*hole. He was trying to torture me. I couldn’t handle it much longer. Wesley bit my earlobe and pushed my jeans even lower…
(Then her dad walks in and Wesley punches him. He screams: “How dare you fu*k my daughter, then hit me, you son of a bi*ch!”)
Who decided to categorize books like The DUFF for juveniles? Was it the same person who decided children should have recess revoked if they fail to sit still in class? Or do they just happen to wear the same eau de stupid?
The answer: a small committee at the Library of Congress in the 1960s. Why? To help readers aged 12-18 locate books they might be interested in so they wouldn’t have to comb through adult content. As the ALA describes it, these measures were taken to “distinguish children’s materials in a library.”
What we have here is a cataloging system in desperate need of retirement.
Stop right there. Because, wow. That’s quite an age spread! A sixth grader vs. a high school senior? Is there really no category between losing your last baby tooth and slinging an M16 on your first tour of duty? Nope, there isn’t. What we have here is cataloging system in desperate need of retirement. We don’t need to improve the current model, we need to reimagine it. The lightbulb isn’t a better candle, it’s an entirely different invention.
The term YA was coined before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Nixon hadn’t won the presidency, and Ed Sullivan was “trending.” Hemingway was reportedly told by his editor that if he didn’t say “damn” in his books, they could market them to the young adult audience to increase sales. (He declined.) True or not, the anecdote shows how much YA has mutated as a category. A recent Atlantic headline reads: “Teen Reads Better Than ‘Fifty Shades.’” So much for “distinguishing children’s materials.”
My oldest daughter is in sixth grade. One of the books on her school reading list is The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time. (Great book. I’ve read it and seen the play.) This book is normally found on high school reading lists. It’s got the word “c*nt” in it. To those who say “kids hear that and worse in school,” your point is… what? “Relax, sweetheart. Don’t be such an uptight 11-year-old”?
Putting this book on a 6th-grade reading list is nothing more than an act of laziness, especially when there are so many (award-winning) age-appropriate novels out there. If your school’s goal is to explore the topic of difference (such as autism), this is not the book you want. The author Mark Haddon has noted, exhaustively, that Curious Incident is not a book about autism or Asperger syndrome and that he wrote the book for an adult audience. In the Telegraph, Haddon explains he never specified a disorder in the book and remains “uncomfortable with the book’s status as a handbook for autistic spectrum disorders.”
Adults are in a terrible hurry to share what they like, what they know, and what they once loved.
But what if the overall message of a book, movie, or show is soooo good that adults tell kids to ignore its “mature” content? Here’s what I say to that: Get a grown-up friend, one who shares your entertainment interests. Get out of the birthday boy’s bouncy castle. None of the kids want you in there, okay? Sit down. Have a beer. Talk sports and politics with the grown-ups.
When a teen is ready, fiction is the ideal place to explore concepts of sex, violence, drugs, and other heavy topics. But “heavy” isn’t the same as “deep.” There’s an abundance of deep (and beautifully dark) books for middle school kids; we’re talking philosophically complex and gorgeously written books that are overlooked because adults are in a terrible hurry to share what they like and what they know and what they once loved. Maybe it’s vanity. Maybe it’s boredom. I’d like to upgrade my 10-year-old; this one doesn’t do much. I’m not sure what’s needed to stop the full-court press on childhood. Perhaps placing giant orange detour signs around kids until they finish eighth grade?
The adult brain is wildly different from the adolescent brain. Tweens and younger teens shouldn’t have to sift through YA labeled books to find one that doesn’t begin, “Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys.”
I don’t believe in banning books. I do believe labels should make it easier for kids to locate books they’re interested in, and to avoid content they hope to avoid. The fact is, “55 percent of YA book consumers are adults, with the biggest segment slotted in the 30–44 age range.” Another (more recent) publisher’s figure identifies 80 percent of YA readers to be adults. The YA label is helping grown-ups find steamy teen novels, but it isn’t helping kids avoid them. On the Guardian’s Book Blog, Anthony McGowan points fingers at the publishers: “The themes, the style, often even the characters [in YA books] belong in the world of adult literature. It is just some quirk of publishing that has left them washed up on the YA shore.” Perhaps this is why YA appeals to middle-aged readers — the books are mislabeled adult fiction.
So what can we do?
The idea behind labeling is not to discourage readers, but to inform them. I found the following idea on the ALA site. Shelve books according to more specific codes, don’t just slap them all with a general “YA” sticker:
A. Preschool (up to, but not including, kindergarten)
B. Primary (kindergarten-third grade)
C. Preadolescent (fourth-eighth grade)
D. Adolescent (ninth-12th grade)
G. General (any audience level)
J. Juvenile (up to age 15, or ninth grade)
Middle schools: Choose books from code C.
High schools: code D(and of course, code J books like Lois Lowry’s The Giver and other timeless reads).
I snapped a photo at my local library. The books labeled YA are a strange mix. There’s Stephen King’s It, which includes a child orgy and the N-word. There’s a graphic novel by tween favorite Raina Telgemeier, and a middle-grade novel by my personal lord and savior, Neil Gaiman. Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book features zero sex, vodka, or profanity. I’m guessing it was shelved next to It because Neil Gaiman is the God of Story and we should all be reading his books.
Point being: the YA label isn’t doing its job.
The YA author Sarah Dessen was born in 1970. She was a teen in the ‘80s, back when pot was cute. (Remember dime bags?) Dessen’s description of getting high sounds like sweet bliss, doesn’t it?
Here’s where I kill your nostalgia. Malcolm Gladwell explains it in The New Yorker: “…the typical concentration of THC (the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana) has gone from the low single digits to more than twenty percent — from a swig of near-beer to a tequila shot.”
Not so cute when your sixth-grader is offered pot gummies equivalent to three shots of tequila.
Dessen is an example of Gen-X logic at its finest: I got wasted, drove drunk, stumbled through school stoned, and look at me: I turned out GREAT! Oh. Did you? I’m Gen-X, too. Let’s be honest, we’re not prime examples of arete — what the Ancient Greeks called “the act of living to one’s full potential”— unless you mean the act of vomiting to one’s full potential from mixing Everclear with grape Kool-Aid.
Robert Bly brilliantly identifies our current society as overrun by “half-adults” — those perpetually sliding backward toward adolescence. (Your Honor, Exhibit A: gummy bear pot. Exhibit B: celebrity worship.) It used to be teens who obsessed over idols. In one study, a third of the population showed borderline-pathological levels of Celebrity Worship Syndrome. It’s reasonable to question whether we, the half-adults, have hijacked the YA label. The category is a mess and the label isn’t doing the one thing it’s supposed to do: help young readers locate books they might be interested in without having to comb through adult content.
I sent a nice email to the principal at my daughter’s middle school asking how books are selected for the school-wide reading list. My email was returned unopened, blocked, and flagged for inappropriate language — I’d included a few lines from Curious Incident, exactly as they appear in the book.
Oh, the irony.
