Library & Information Science,
Course 262: Resources for Young Adults.
Dr. David Loertscher
Summer, 1998
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Source: "From Despair to Hope: Realistic Fiction for Older Children and Teens, 1997," In: Horning, Kathleen T., Ginny Moore Kruse, and Megan Schliesman. CCBC Choices 1997. Madison, WI: Cooperative Children's Book Center, 1998, p. 16.
The most noticeable trend in fiction for older readers this year was the number of fine novels examining intense and weighty issues in their young protagonists' lives. This is especially true in fiction for young adults, but even some of the novels for younger readers reflect a world that is often inexplicable in the tragedy or cruelty it delivers. Hope is present in these somber novels fro readers of all ages, but perhaps the biggest difference is that in the novels for children, it has a powerful, transformative effect, while in the novels for young adults, it is often buried, a thin, delicate strand that the protagonist has no way of seeing at the novel's beginning, and has barely grasped onto by the story's end.
Among the books for children, Karen Hesse's exquisitely written Out of the Dust follows the life of a 14-year-old Billie Jo through a terrible, tragic year in this novel set in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the 1930s that does end with a renewed sense of hope. Jerry Spinelli's Wringer looks at a tense and fearful year in the life of a nine-year-old boy who feels trapped by community and family tradition and peer pressure.
One of the most stunning, difficult novels for teens this year was Adam Rapps' the Buffalo Tree. Set in a juvenile reform school., it is a narrative both poetic and intentionally crude, capturing the tough, tender voice of a 12-year-old inmate of this harsh and brutal place. Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves, a National book Award nominee, is another provocative first-person narrative in which 13-year-old Linda describes her life of abuse and neglect in a voice eerily disconnected from the emotional weight of the facts she recites, so numb has she become in an attempt to survive all that has happened in her life. Norma Fox Mazer writes of a teen's painful attempts to overcome the psychological trauma of years of physical and emotional abuse from her older sister in the haunting and beautiful Where She Was Good. Finally, Robert Cormier's Tenderness combines a chilling profile of a teenage serial killer with an emphatic portrayal of the emotionally wounded young woman who may be his next victim, and manages to facilitate readers' understanding and sympathy for both by the story's end.
There was a lighter side to fiction this year as well, though lighter does not necessarily mean lighthearted, nor less substantial. We are extremely happy to see Naomi Shihab Nye's Habibi, about a Palestinian-American girl who moves to Jerusalem with her family. Nye's protagonist, Liyana, looks at the world with a poet's expansive, exacting eyes. Liyana's voice as she describes her life in Jerusalem, her Palestinian family, and her friendship with a Jewish boy is extraordinary for its freshness and beautiful innocence in a novel that is unusual in so many ways, not the least of which is its setting and subject matter, so rarely seen in U.S. books for children.
Kevin Henke's Sun and Spoon, about a young boy's grief over the loss of his grandmother, offers a richly detailed rendering of a child's emotional character, as well as a finely honed portrait of the sphere of his existence - family, home and neighborhood - as its protagonist arrives at a way to keep his grandmother close to him. Seedfolks, by Paul Fleischman, describes the transformation of an inner-city neighborhood as the result of a community garden, while Brian Doyle brilliantly sets a comic backdrop against which he lets the personal story of a boy and his mother who flee the child's abusive father play out with honesty in Uncle Ronald.
Ultimately, what we appreciate most about the writers of these and other fine novels for young people is that they respect their readers, whether children or young adults, by writing stories in which the events and emotions are honest and authentic to whatever experience is described. Children and young adults deserve nothing less.