For a long time, young adult literature was narrowly conceived, first as “junior novels” about romance, careers, or sports, and then, in the late 1960s, concerned with social issues as exemplified in the lessons learned by a teen protagonist. Gangs (The Outsiders), drugs (Tuned Out), runaways (Go Ask Alice), mental illness (Lisa, Bright and Dark), child abuse (Don’t Hurt Laurie!), alcoholism (The Late Great Me), and incest (Abby, My Love) were all favorite topics. While these books were intended as a kind of bibliotherapy, allowing young teen readers an easy, nonthreatening entry into sensitive topics, they were more often read as adventure stories, providing bookish junior-high kids with vicarious thrills about life on the wild side. I’m a little old to have been an audience for these books, but I remember the similar charge I got out of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade, a 1963 memoir of Wilkerson’s ministry to hardened teens on the streets of New York. I completely ignored the book’s heavy Christian evangelical message to focus on the sordid but enthralling tales of gang fights and heroin addiction. But if I did not become “born again” as a result of reading this book, neither did I start mainlining “horse.” I stayed the dweeby little egghead I was. Critics of these books (and Go Ask Alice is still frequently banned in school libraries today) made the same mistake that proponents did: each assumed that such books would “do something” to (or for) young readers. Both positions assume that reading does something it does not. While a novel about, say, drug abuse, will give a reader information and points to consider, it won’t get him high. It also won’t scare him straight, either — books don’t work this way.
You know this. When you read some morbid Swedish murder mystery or sex-soaked Jackie Collins romp, you know it’s a story, not a set of instructions. But our laudable and instinctive desire to protect our young (or, less charitably, our shortsighted and futile desire to control our young) leads us to believe that they read differently from us, that they are “impressionable.” We all are. If reading didn’t have an effect on us, we wouldn’t do it; the mistake is in thinking that the effect is as simple as how-to, for kids or for ourselves.
In its beginnings, young adult literature was a subset of children’s literature, YA books being published by the same publishing divisions as children’s books were. But while you could find a children’s book on just about any subject, YA limited itself to realistic (more or less) treatments of contemporary teen life. Through the 1980s, the genre was overwhelmingly populated by short novels set in the present, often with a first-person teen narrator (who was most often white), about some aspect of teen life. The canvases and casts of characters were small, and the plots generally followed a formula: a teen has a problem of a personal nature, has some melodrama, learns (along with readers) about the problem’s parameters, and overcomes it. Happy endings were the rule, one most famously broken by Robert Cormier, who, in novels such as The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese let the bad guys win. There were some expert practitioners, such as M. E. Kerr (Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!; Gentlehands) and Richard Peck (Are You in the House Alone?; Remembering the Good Times), who brought distinctive voices and humor to the genre, but it was a fairly narrow field. But YA books were only ever meant to be one aspect of teenage reading. Along with problem novels and teen romance paperbacks, teens were reading such popular adult authors as Stephen King, V. C. Andrews, and Mary Higgins Clark. Teenagers provided the backbone of science fiction and fantasy publishing, and almost all of their nonfiction interests were served by books for adults. “YA literature” has never been synonymous with “what teenagers read.”
Problem novels have remained popular while they gained in sophistication. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s 1999 Speak, high-school freshman Melinda isn’t talking, barely managing monosyllabic responses in class and at home, silently enduring the taunts of classmates for her having called the cops to a party the previous summer. Her inner narration, though, is powerfully acidic as she epigrammatically catalogs the meannesses, both petty and deep, of high-school life: “Nothing good ever happens at lunch. The cafeteria is a giant sound stage where they film daily segments of Teenage Humiliation Rituals. And it smells gross.” Eventually, we learn that Melinda was raped by an older boy, Andy, at that party, and the book ends with Melinda holding a shard of glass to his neck while she reminds him of what she had said at the party: “I said no.” While the success of Speak inspired a flurry of teen novels about elective muteness, those rather missed what made Anderson’s book so magnetic. Speak is about a girl on her own with a terrifying secret. She is silent but watchful and smarter than just about everyone else in the story. You can see how this might be appealing. Silent and watchful and feeling smarter is part of what being a reader is all about. And Speak spoke to undedicated readers as well: the voice is smart and ironic but the style is crisp and immediate, and the fact that we don’t know for quite a while exactly why Melinda isn’t talking gives the book suspense.
It’s worth repeating that Speak and other “problem novels” aren’t meant to be read as problem solvers: in real life, a girl in Melinda’s situation doesn’t need a book; she needs help. Books help, yes; reading helps, but it’s not a case of connecting the dots. If you were a girl in Melinda’s situation, the last thing you might want is a book that comes that close. But if you’re a girl who feels different, misunderstood, maybe isolated (that is, if you feel like a reader), then this book could speak to you.
A counterpoint to Speak for boys could be Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, published the same year. In the beginning of the book, Steve is jailed and awaiting trial for his alleged participation in a Harlem drugstore holdup that left the proprietor dead. No one is accusing Steve of the shooting or even of being in the store at the time; he’s instead charged with casing the joint to make sure no customers would be there to witness the robbery. In court, Steve insists he wasn’t even in the store that day, much less a co-conspirator, but . . . let’s just say that Myers applies the standard of reasonable doubt to a whole lot of things in this novel, trusting his readers to find the truth. The first recipient of the Printz Award, Monster manages to be that rare thing, both reader-friendly and risk-taking. Structured as a screenplay for a movie written, directed, and “starring sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon as the Boy on Trial for Murder!” the book looks easy and fun to read, comprised mostly of dialogue and directions for settings and camera shots, with occasional grainy screen caps and handwritten excerpts from Steve’s journal. At the same time, though, Myers is insistently reminding us that everything we’re learning is from Steve’s POV. It’s a remarkably strategic use of first-person perspective in a genre where narrators can almost always be taken at their word. As is usual in YA literature, we’re encouraged to identify with the protagonist, but the close questioning of his public defender and the prosecutor and the testimony of the robbers nibbles at our empathy, putting us in the interesting situation of identifying with the perhaps-guilty, not a frequent position for young adult readers, as readers, to be in. They can handle it.
From the 1990s, though, and perhaps precipitated by an increase in the numbers of teens, YA publishing broadened. The books got longer, and fantasy and science fiction, horror fiction, historical fiction, verse novels, and nonfiction joined traditional contemporary realism. There is more humor, too, mostly chick-lit romance comedy of the Bridget Jones’s Diary ilk. Perhaps most significantly, the YA books of today more often assume a high-school readership rather than the younger teens who once provided the largest audience for problem novels and Sweet Dreams romances: the “Gr. 7 and up, Age 12 and up” designation became “Gr. 9 and up, Age 14 and up.” This is not necessarily because they are racier but because they are becoming more complex and in some cases indistinguishable from serious adult fiction.
The wild success of Bridget Jones’s Diary not only inspired a whole genre of adult chick lit; it spawned junior versions as well, like Louise Rennison’s popular, likable books about Georgia Nicolson. Ye Shall Know Them By Their Pink Covers! In turn, these lightly romantic comedies were inevitably joined by some faster big sisters. Series like Gossip Girl feature fairly hard-core “mean girls,” boozing, and sex. While paperback junk has always been part of the teenage reading menu, Gossip Girl and the like don’t make even the feeblest of gestures toward being “good for you.” They provide a kind of Go Ask Alice vicarious thrill, but that of hot boys and glamorous clothes rather than drugs and running away.
When does a young adult book become an adult book? Whether there is a genuine distinction between books for children and books for adults, and what that distinction might be, are questions at the heart of children’s literature scholarship. Writing in 1974, British critic John Rowe Townsend, acknowledging its difficulty, essentially threw up his hands at the question, saying “a children’s book is one that appears on a publisher’s children’s list.” But young adult books won’t let us off that easily. Some books, for example, are adult books in one country and YA books here, or the other way round — The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an adult book here, but in the UK it was published as both young adult and adult — likewise for The Spell Book of Listen Taylor by Jaclyn Moriarty, published as an adult book in Australia but then re-edited for YA here. These publishing vagaries are generally dictated by marketing departments and differing national conceptions of “teen reading,” but readers need not pay attention. High-school readers should and will choose their books from all over the place. They read best sellers: teens in no small part were responsible for the blockbuster success of Flowers in the Attic and A Child Called “It.” The teen audience is crucial to sales of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.
Adolescence is also a time for first efforts in ambitious reading, like the Russian classics, or big-theory (and big-ass) books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. Despite their appeal for generations of teen readers, such books contradict received wisdom on What Teens Like. They do not star teen characters, they are not about the problems of everyday life, and they often employ an array of narrative strategies beyond the first person. But the same teen who is tackling big-theme, large-cast books may at the same time be reading Gossip Girl or even, at the end of a very tough day, Harry the Dirty Dog. The point of being a skilled reader is not to read increasingly difficult books, it’s to allow you scope: the pianist who has mastered the Piano Sonata in D by Mozart doesn’t forswear his earlier Sonata in C simply because it’s easier to play.
Books don’t know who reads them, but books for adults assume the reader is their equal. And it follows that, as readers, you and your teenage children are equals, too. (If not competition — my mother and I spent a week stealing Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight back and forth from each other.) Feel free to share, but leave your kid plenty of room and privacy. The current vogue for book clubs might lead one to think that the primary goal of reading is to have something to talk about with your friends. While books do provide a durable kind of social glue, you might find that your child is not especially interested in sticking to you. He or she will probably be more interested in the pursuit or discovery of like-minded souls, both within the pages of books and in like-minded fellows who see the brilliance of, for example, Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett or Francesca Lia Block. Should your child invite you in, by all means accept, but don’t make the first move. Let your kid lead. Books require — and provide — privacy and independence.
William Shakespeare asked, “To be, or not to be?” The Clash sang, “Should I stay or should I go?” Same conflict, different cadence. Charles Darwin posited the survival of the fittest. Snoop Dogg touts the dominance of the illest. Same attitude, different argot.
Brows come in high- and low-. Unfortunately for artist Frida Kahlo, actor Josh Hartnett, and Bert the Muppet, they also come in uni-. But unlike unibrows on faces, unibrow literature — the union of academy and street into a work that enlightens and entertains — is a thing of beauty. It has the power to bring into the literary fold young adults who are not merely reluctant readers but those who are downright averse to the written word.
As a young adult novelist, I aim for the tale and the telling that together will convey, in the cultural vernacular of the reader, my intellectual values. The transmission of moral values I leave to the literati preachers. My books house teen mothers, high-school dropouts, shoplifting homeboys, preppy drug dealers, and girl arsonists. A few characters are gay; others are straight. Most strive to achieve a positive goal; some seek little more than their idle, pointless status quo. But it is not only the down-and-(nearly-)out who are represented. The cast also includes paralegals, college kids, teenage entrepreneurs, computer-savvy project girls, and budding artists.
I have been asked why the books I write don’t paint a clear, bright line of judgment with regard to situations I depict, such as teenage pregnancy, vandalism, or fistfights. One person asked me simply why I didn’t “get on a soapbox.” Well, soapboxes are for soap, and soap is for washing clean. Books give off light, and light reveals the dirty, the clean, and the in-between. It is more important to me that young people read than that they behave well. Put more provocatively, closed legs are good, but an open mind is better.
I am not drawn to the pulpit — it is the podium that inspires me. And from my podium I write up, not down, to readers. I write about, although obviously not exclusively for, black teenagers. And contrary to what appears to be conventional wisdom, I see no problem evoking both T. S. Eliot and Missy Elliott, lacrosse and basketball, buggin’ out and Sturm und Drang, pumpkin soup and BBQ spareribs, and generally whipping up a rich unibrow mix of do-rags, private schools, collard greens, blazers, hoodies, Bill Clinton, rap music, Basquiat, ya mama jokes, Harlem redstones, violin adagios, housing projects, three-story Colonials, baggy jeans, Dostoyevsky, graffiti, and flaming calla lilies.
My novel Brother Hood opens with Nathaniel, a black teenage boy, on a train reading Crime and Punishment — prompting a major publishing figure to suggest that I stop “showing off.” Now, I admit to having something close to a fetish for Fyodor. I have read Crime and Punishment at least three times and his short story “The Double” half a dozen times. So naturally I want others to discover Dostoyevsky’s powerful and engrossing tales. What should Nathaniel have been reading on that train ride home to Harlem? The latest sex, drugs, and gangbanger literature aimed at black teenagers? VIBE magazine? Why not expose kids to the classics along with more contemporary writing? After all, these works have endured through the centuries for a reason — they capture the human experience at its essence and thus withstand time and transcend race.
I receive numerous e-mails from young people. Many are self-described nonreaders who discovered a taste for literature through my books. They identify with and can understand certain language and vocabulary, which reflects how they or their friends talk. They like the humor, which leaves them, as one girl put it, “on tha flo” laughing. They identify with my taste in music and movies (“Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood is my favorite movie, too!”).
My fantasy is that some of those readers will be so delighted that they will follow with brimming curiosity the trails of crumbs I’ve dropped all along their path, right alongside the Ebonics wisecracks and rap lyrics. They will read Crime and Punishment because Nathaniel in Brother Hood made it sound thrilling. They will get a dictionary and look up doppelgänger, enigma, succubus, and xenophobia, words that filled my character Raven Jefferson’s head in Spellbound. Like Chill Wind’s Aisha Ingram, they will marvel at the fact that anyone would sell Manhattan for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets. I hope that everyone will learn the French words that pop up throughout my books and will be so intrigued by my shameless and constant promotion of Paris as the place to be that reader after reader will come and knock at my door. Inside, we’ll dance to Snoop’s latest and, over dinner, discuss Hamlet.
How long will I live? asks Snoop in “Murder Was the Case (Death After Visualizing Eternity).” Shakespeare gives the rapper an “hour upon the stage” to strut and fret. Their respective musings on mortality resonate and flow together like a Sunday sermon’s call and response. It is by offering both that young adult literature will enrich readers.
For years, when my publisher tried to call my books mysteries, I insisted that they’re thrillers. It’s a lowbrow term, connoting blood, guns, and nefarious activities. Basically, thrillers tend to be about nasty people doing bad, illegal, and/or unethical things, although usually there’s also a blameless individual around as protagonist who is endangered body and soul by these bad people and their immoral plans.
Louisa May Alcott wrote thrillers back before she turned into a respectable children’s author. It’s fascinating to get a glimpse of the joy Alcott took in penning tales of seductresses, drug addicts, and murderers. Similarly, readers of thrillers are looking for the vicarious, well, thrill of consorting with people who are no better than they should be, people who are doing things that shock us, make us afraid, and, if we are honest, excite us. Thrillers are a guilty-pleasure type of reading. Mysteries are almost respectable, but thrillers? No.
So it’s certainly tempting to get defensive and declare that a good thriller is constructed from the same ingredients that make any good book: close intellectual attention to the braid of character, plot, and theme; strong writing that uses a considered mix of dialogue, exposition, and action and a minimum of adverbs; etc., etc. But this would be an evasion. Suspense thrillers are indeed different beasts, and writing a good one is not the same as writing any good mainstream literary novel, even when the two share many qualities.
Traditionally, a thriller requires a heroic (or at least semi-heroic) main character and a villain. The two alternately chase and circle each other around some crime. In my novel The Killer’s Cousin, the crimes are concealed in the past. The hero, David Yaffe, is tormented and guilt-ridden. (The tormented hero is a popular American heroic variant: think Raymond Chandler.) So far, so standard. But in this, my first thriller, I got lucky in the characterization of the young villain, Lily. Because Lily is a child, David can’t confront her physically, no matter how threatening she is. He’s trapped. And therefore, so are the readers of the novel, as they imagine themselves in his place. You cannot, after all, bludgeon an eleven-year-old girl to death. Not even in your imagination. No matter how much you might want to.
The creation of suspense is not simple, I realized. And it is not really about “what happens at the end.” You can’t rely on making the reader afraid by keeping the eventual safety of the main character in doubt, for example. Frankly, the modern reader knows it’s unlikely the hero will die or even sustain a major injury.
This realization caused me to make the reckless choice to give away the ending in my latest thriller. The Rules of Survival is about three children who are at the mercy of a woman who should never have been a mother in the first place. Right on page one, the oldest sibling, Matthew, explains that he is telling the story in retrospect. That all three kids are alive and doing fine. That everybody made it.
Having given away the ending, I was thrown on my resources as a writer to make the journey of the novel terrifying. This meant trying to make “what happens next” exciting and suspenseful, of course. But it also meant trying to find innovative ways to induce shared fear in the reader.
Contemplating the third draft, I had an idea. I rewrote the novel, abandoning the straightforward narrative I had used previously, and turned it into a long letter written by Matthew to his youngest sister. This means that there’s not only an “I” telling the story, but also a “you” listening to the story. And although the “you” is nominally five-year-old Emmy, it’s also you-the-reader — a fact that some readers will notice but that others will accept without considering how it operates on them.
This technical choice — writing in first person but using direct address — replaces the usual “How does it end?” uncertainty by seizing you-the-reader by the throat and taking you along on the Walsh children’s journey through hell, not as observer but as participant.
Thus, you are Emmy Walsh. You are five years old. As the story begins, you do not even speak. But you’re smart and observant, and, most of all, you’re willful. Therefore, you don’t always listen to your much-older brother and sister when they explain to you how to maneuver around Mommy and her scary, unpredictable ways.
Now, as you read that bit of description, you-the-reader should feel a little uneasy, perhaps even a little fearful. Because as you become Emmy, you realize: who cares about the safe ending? First, you have to get there. First, you have to go through hell.
The manipulative use of tension is what makes a thriller different from any other good book. But as you will also perceive, it is not quite as simple as saying that the tension must build higher and higher and higher. The skilled writer must also know when to lessen the tension, when to give the reader a break before, very soon, tightening the screws yet again. Harder. And the skilled writer will do that tightening in as innovative a way as possible, using whichever of the many tools in her writer’s toolbox is best suited to the story at hand.
I have one more secret about writing thrillers to share. This one is not about technique, but about heart.
Fear has ruled me ever since I can remember. Not because my childhood was extraordinarily fear-filled. I think it is simply my temperament. I remember distinctly, for example, being ten years old and looking at illustrations of North America during the Ice Age. I plotted how my family would escape to Florida if the ice suddenly returned. I imagined us taking the last airplane out, fighting our way past other frantic refugees. We might have to kick, even to kill. I planned for that. Survival at all costs, I thought. For me. For those I love.
This same sentiment powers Matthew in The Rules of Survival. He says to his little sister — and to you-the-reader:
This is what I think happens when you live with fear. . . . I think the fear gets into your blood. It makes your subatomic particles twist and distort. You change, chemically. The fear changes, too. It becomes . . . your master. You are a slave to it.
In writing suspense, I draw heavily on my own fear. In The Rules of Survival, I used that fear to write about a not-uncommon nightmare situation that I myself have never experienced. In my other novels, likewise: I have never killed anyone (The Killer’s Cousin), never been kidnapped (Locked Inside), never stumbled onto a illegal drug distribution network (Black Mirror), and never found shady scientific experiments going on in the basement (Double Helix). But this is not to say that I have not experienced fear. Like Matthew and my other characters, I have lived it. And like Matthew, I work out my fears using writing. Thus I know exactly how to map my fear onto my characters, so that you-the-reader can feel its reality. You will feel it because my writing will force you, in turn, to map the characters’ fears onto your own fears. To become one with them, and with me.
We all — adult, child, and teen alike — know what it is to fear. And we all want to learn how to handle our fear. Safely. Safely, within the pages of a book.
This, to me, is the pull of the thriller.
ROGER SUTTON: You have very fervent fans.
SARAH DESSEN: They’re fantastic — they buy the book the day it’s released and read it incredibly quickly and then immediately e-mail me and ask when the next one is coming out! It’s really the highest compliment. Young adults are an amazing audience to be writing for, because you’re catching people at their most enthusiastic about reading. Adults are a little more reserved. I still get excited about good books, but I don’t get jumping-up-and-down-screaming excited. It’s such a passionate time, adolescence. I remember the feeling in high school, and even in middle school, of reading a book and really connecting with it on that elemental level of “somebody understands me.” It’s so powerful. It’s a great market to be writing for because you connect so strongly with your audience.
RS: I think part of that connection is that you create these characters that girls — and I’m assuming that most of your readers are girls — can see themselves in and relate to. Yet they are all individuals. I see a lot of common themes in your books, but each one of those girls is a different person. How do you balance making a character particular with making her universal?
SD: There are certain things about the teenage experience in our culture that are always going to be there: the issues you have with your parents; the boy you have a crush on who doesn’t know your name; the friend who isn’t nice to you, but for some reason you’re friends with her anyway. But then there’s room within those experiences to make each character unique.
The thing that all my narrators have in common is that they are girls on the verge of a big change. And how they deal with that change is where the story comes from. When I was in high school, I was never happy with myself and I always wanted to believe that there was the potential for something big to happen in my life. You know — that I was going to meet some amazing guy and come to some stunning realization about myself that was going to make my life better. I think that’s very appealing at that age, because it can happen. At that age, a girl can go away for the summer and when she comes back in the fall, she’s completely different. She’s taller, she’s blossomed. There’s so much potential. That’s why I like writing about this age, because there’s still so much room to come into one’s self, so much change happening fast and furious. There’s a wealth of material there.
RS: I notice that you often start with a precipitating offstage event. For instance, in The Truth About Forever, the death of the father happens before the book actually begins, but it sets in motion all the things that happen to the heroine.
SD: I think that’s often how you feel as a teenager, that the world is happening around you, and you’re sort of whirling and getting bounced around within it. I remember feeling that way, that I didn’t have much control over my own destiny. Everything was happening to me, and I was just trying to keep my head above water.
RS: Do you think of yourself as a writer for girls?
SD: I do. I don’t kid myself; I don’t think a lot of boys are reading my books. My books are so firmly fixed in the girl mindset and the girl point of view. Women tend to want to share our experiences more, to talk about what’s going on with us. Especially when things are going badly or you’re stressed out, to find some commonality or sense of recognition in a story is very comforting. Boys are different that way. They don’t want to talk about everything that’s going on with them. One comment I get again and again from girls is, “I read your book and it is my life — it’s like it’s my school and my teachers.”
RS: And that’s also the theme of your books. It’s not just that you have readers, who, because they are girls, explore their emotions through reading. Your books are about young women trying to understand themselves and their place in the world.
SD: My setup, typically, involves a character feeling disjointed and out of place — maybe because she once felt more in place and then something happened to make her lose her footing, or maybe she’s never felt that she fit anywhere and has been looking for a way to find her place. It’s a pretty universal experience: much of adolescence is just trying to figure out where you fit in, where your spot is, who your people are.
RS: Do you think that that’s something particular to girls?
SD: No, but I think the willingness to explore it is. Girls are much more willing to face the fact that they’re looking for it, and more willing to reach out for it, than boys. People have said to me many times that I should write a book from a boy’s point of view. All I can say is that I spent four years of high school sitting around with my friends analyzing what boys were thinking. That’s all we did. We would sit at lunch and be like, “He said hi to me in the hall — what did that mean?”
RS: Nothing!
SD: Right, completely cryptic! So I can’t even imagine saying what some boy means. Or what he’s thinking. I don’t know how boys think. I wish I did.
RS: In the 1980s, there was an earlier wave of “let’s have more books for boys” going on. A number of women writers tried their hand at a male perspective. But the characters weren’t real boys. They were male, but they would talk to each other and to other people as if they were women. It was as if the goal of these books was to take these tough characters and turn them into women. Put ’em in touch with their feelings. Make ’em cry. Make ’em talk about things. And I wasn’t convinced.
SD: Teen readers can tell if someone’s writing about them and it’s not right. One of the most important things in writing for teens is to be genuine, and not to write down to them, not to proselytize or try to force-feed them a message. My books are not about social issues. I’m just telling the kind of story that I want to hear, writing the kind of book I wanted to read when I was in high school.
RS: Do you have an opinion about the term chick lit?
SD: I’m not as offended by it as others are. But I also think it’s become too wide a term. We sort of throw anything with a pink cover into the category now. It used to be targeted very specifically, and now anything that isn’t Literature and has women in it is chick lit. It seems like you’re one or the other, you’re “literary” or you’re “chick lit.” And that’s unfortunate, because there are lots of shades in between. But I’m not offended by it, because I am writing books for girls. I like that my covers are kind of pink and cute. I’m not gonna lie. In high school that’s the kind of cover I wanted to pick up — and that’s still the kind of cover that I’m drawn to.
It was 1964 and I was fourteen when I first read The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. After considering the last bit of what Holden Caulfield had to say to me — “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” — I decided this was the second-best book I’d ever found, after Robert Ruark’s Something of Value. And found is the right word: I had picked Holden’s tale from the rather cheesy paperback rack at Packett’s Pharmacy during my endless browses there, choosing it over Leonard Wibberley’s The Mouse That Roared (not about mice) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (not about animals or farming), because Catcher seemed much stranger. Strange was good.
I felt pretty serious about bestowing my number-two all-time honor on Salinger — the man ought to feel honored. Nobody I knew took books as seriously as I did, except my dad, but he read only Harold Robbins and Erle Stanley Gardner and James Michener. Alas for Pops: I felt The Catcher in the Rye was simply too much book for him. He was better off tucking up with Perry Mason in that attorney’s predictable murder courtroom, or with Mr. Michener in Hawaii, than he would be trying to hang with old Holden in his goddamned prep school, or his dive New York City hotel, or his little sister’s room — good old Phoebe — after midnight.
So I did not recommend Catcher to my dad, though I owed him one for his urging me to read The Carpetbaggers. It would not have been fair. One could not expect adults to handle the kind of rough stuff Holden was laying down.
Ah, well. Little did I know what I would soon find out — that I was measurably something called a Young Reader, and that The Catcher in the Rye was a special-reserve official Adult Novel, technically more appropriate for my father than for little me. I had no right to possess this book, never mind how naturally me and old Holden hit it off; I had no authority to parse its distribution among grown-ups like my dad, no matter how baffled I knew they would be by its life. Not my call: The Catcher in the Rye was fully a Brilliantly Offbeat Work of Serious Literature, and one that already belonged to Them. The adults would prove their provenance with elite awards, doctoral dissertations, and critical-intellectual studies embodied in entire books! Holden Caulfield was the precious property of the grandest high-literary thinkers.
And I thought he was just a kid like me, running through a cool and shuddering story. But I was wrong, or at least only partially perceptive. Holden stood adamantine as some kind of icon, voice, symbol, avatar, age-displaced induction of pan-generational mimesis, etc. Holden, and Salinger, were highly Major. Whereas I and my teen buddies, along with our descendants for the next fifty years, were measurably Minor.
In 1998, my son Alex, then age fourteen, wrote me a letter that began:
Dear Bruce,
Hey, Happy Birthday, 48, hard to believe. Hope you had a great day. Listen, I have to tell you about a book I just read. You need to check it out, I know you will get it all. It’s called “Catcher in the Rye,” the author is JD Salinger. You know how much I hate the idea that there is something general that adults try to call “teen experience” (like there’s “adult experience” right?). Well, as much as I hate the idea and those words, I have to say Salinger got teen experience just right, at least for ONE teen, a kid named Holden. Read this book, and we can talk about it!
Alex’s letter was still fresh in my mind when I opened a New Yorker in 2001 and found a long article titled “Holden at Fifty” by one of our leading intellects of high culture, Louis Menand.
Menand said essentially this: The Catcher in the Rye is a great book, but really it has nothing to do with young people. Holden Caulfield is nothing like a young person. He is too astute, too precise with language, and too sensitive to be so young; Salinger was playing around, trying to pass this wonderful character off as a kid. Furthermore, Catcher itself is not really a book that should be read by young people — they are insufficiently astute, precise with language, and sensitive to appreciate the book. In fact, young readers don’t even truly like the novel: they read it only because adults say they should, and they pretend to enjoy it for the same reason. According to Menand, no young reader ever discovered The Catcher in the Rye on his or her own; a sophisticated but misguided adult must have been involved.
But what did I expect from a piece called “Holden at Fifty”? Holden was not fifty in 2001. Holden will never be fifty. Holden was sixteen in 1951, and he is sixteen today. That will not change, whether the novel is fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred. It may take the sixteen-year-olds of those times to tell, though.
It is a truism among people in the young adult field that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye would likely be published today as YAs. Or, at least, they could be, successfully — and not just because they are narrated by young people. The reason they make the grade as YA novels is simple: Huck, Scout, and Holden act their ages. These three characters look like kids, walk like kids, and quack like kids. Not because they are exactly like existing kids, or because they may be deemed “accurate” by the critics who use that chilly word as a virtue and count accuracy as “truth.” Rather, these three narrators tell us unique stories, in unique voices, which allow us to believe that their lives fit.
Ultimately, the fact that The Catcher in the Rye is not designated an official Young Adult Book hasn’t limited its availability to young readers, much less its appeal to them. (The novel is frequently challenged or banned for kids, but so are many YA books.) Holden Caulfield’s tale is probably the book most widely read by teenagers, generation after generation, and perhaps most widely enjoyed. The Catcher in the Rye is windy and stony and hot and cool, brilliantly subtle and disarmingly overt, straightforward, manipulative, sentimental, pragmatic, crazy, controlled, always precise. But perhaps most important, to adult readers in ignorance, and to young readers in wisdom, The Catcher in the Rye is ineffably young.
I didn’t even ask why I was turning into Holden Caulfield. I was fifteen, a brochure girl for postwar innocence. And I was a farm kid, three thousand miles away from Holden’s Manhattan; I took violin lessons, rode my bike through orchards, memorized social-studies facts, picked strawberries to make money, earned Camp Fire Girl honor beads. I also sought the right bras, the right pimple medicine, the boys most likely to alarm my family.
The Catcher in the Rye came into my life at a rummage sale, and I read it in one evening. Within the next few days, I heard myself reciting whole paragraphs from memory, and in doing so I began to notice that I was driving nearly everyone away. My usually affectionate family loathed Holden and me enough to shoot scornful looks over to our side of the dinner table and forget to pass us the potatoes. It went on for months.
The gender difference didn’t occur to me.
Why not? I now ask myself. Didn’t it seem really, really, really odd that I was this boy who was hanging Sunny’s sad green dress on a hanger in a New York hotel room? I don’t think I gave it a thought.
I look back on whom I was choosing to be: an academic failure who had done nearly everything wrong that he’d been asked to do right; a boy who was making his own journey into the underworld and taking meticulous note of its sinister mien; a narrator whose flair for vulgarity was almost choral and who was intimately attuned to the sanctity of life; a solitary wanderer who, like many teenagers, was just learning how to take the full measure of his undisciplined temperament; a protagonist who wanted to save falling children and who was saved by his little sister; a borrower and a lender who was teaching me about responses to defilement, a lesson I would continue to need as the beleaguered twentieth century stumbled forward.
Somehow I’ve gotten through the intervening years without ever examining whether or not I was unconsciously seeking a gender change (no, I was not), whether or not I had penis envy, whether or not I wanted to try on boyhood. But as I ask these questions even now, it seems that it was a literary identification of convenience. Getting to be Holden let me use his brain, which was so much more interesting than mine. When I was Holden, I had form, shape, demeanor. He gave me someone to be.
I had loved living with Betsy and Tacy, had enjoyed bustling around solving mysteries with Nancy Drew, but I hadn’t become them. They were book friends, and they didn’t give my mother the migraines that my immersion in Holden’s life gave her.
What I do know at this distance: Holden was teaching me about structure and narration, about the subjectivity, the turn-on-a-dime bias inherent in fiction. I had heard certain kinds of storytelling all my life. His kind was new, alluring in its impertinence, the perfect vehicle for me to use as an armored car in an adolescence that really didn’t need one. And there was a poignant gravity to Holden that has never left me. Could I have guessed that the mere mention of his name could still upset people, all these decades later? Not a bit.
As a grown-up reader I love the sweet agony of becoming Jane Eyre, Clarissa Dalloway, Natalie Babbitt’s Winnie Foster, and some of Alice Munro’s exquisitely sculpted characters. But I think my early subversive partnership with Holden has also made it possible for me to come closer to becoming David Copperfield, Jerry Renault, Jesse Aarons, Will Parry, King Lear, and my favorite, Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. Holden let me sneak briefly into the guys’ clubhouse, and I’ll always be grateful.
Sherman Alexie, illustrations by Ellen Forney, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
232 pp. Grades 8–10. Junior makes the difficult commute from his Spokane Indian reservation to an off-rez high school where he’s the only Indian. His inimitable and hilarious narration is intensely alive with short paragraphs, poetry in prose, one-liners, and take-no-prisoners cartoons.
Coe Booth, Kendra
293 pp. Grade 9 and up. Kendra, fourteen, lives with her strict but loving grandmother. Hot guy Nashawn has Kendra doing things that shame as well as excite her. Does Nashawn love her? Does her recently returned mother? Kendra’s present-tense narration is intelligent and honest, grounded by her basic common sense.
Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
422 pp. Grade 10 and up. After her mother leaves, seventeen-year-old Ruby is placed in the care of her sister. The intricacy of relationships shines in this in-depth exploration of family, trust, and responsibility. The complex, deeply sympathetic characters are pure pleasure to spend time with.
Sharon Dogar, Annexed
341 pp. This audacious novel is Peter van Pels’s first-person, present-tense chronicle of life in the Annex with the Frank family. The novel provides a new look at Anne Frank — speculative, of course, but in no way contradicting her own famous diary.
Saci Lloyd, The Carbon Diaries 2015
330 pp. Grades 7–10. In a brilliantly conceived speculative drama set in the future, Lloyd extrapolates a logical, world-changing application of global warming that is both optimistic and terrifying. This gripping, perceptive, and impassioned book contains equal parts political immediacy and tart humor.
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
342 pp. Grades 8–10. Frankie’s boyfriend, Matthew, is the co-leader of an all-male secret society at her elite prep school. A clinical-sounding narrator addresses readers directly, giving the book a case-study vibe and presenting Frankie’s exploits in a dispassionate way so that readers are left to make up their own minds about this unique, multifaceted young woman.
Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Dairy Queen
278 pp. Grade 9 and up. Coaching the rival high school’s quarterback in a summer fitness program, farm girl (and football player) D.J. realizes she’s attracted to Brian, even as they face off on the field. D.J.’s practical, understatedly humorous voice drives this engrossing tale of love, family, and football. Sequels: The Off Season and Front and Center
Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
281 pp. Content to shadow her high-wattage older sister, seventeen-year-old clarinetist and secret poet Lennie is devastated when Bailey dies unexpectedly. Lennie’s profound loss awakens unanticipated new feelings, including an unwelcome attraction to Bailey’s bereft boyfriend and healthy first love with an exuberant new boy. Tender, romantic, and loaded with passion.
Marcus Sedgwick, Revolver
204 pp. His family’s Arctic Circle cabin is Sig’s entire world — a secure one until the day his father dies and the menacing Gunther Wolff arrives, demanding the gold Sig’s father owes him from the Alaska Gold Rush. Tight plotting and a wealth of moral concerns will appeal to fans of Gary Paulsen, Jack London, and even Cormac McCarthy.
Francisco X. Stork, Marcelo in the Real World
316 pp. Grade 9 and up. Seventeen-year-old Marcelo is at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. A summer job in the mailroom at his father’s cutthroat law firm tests Marcelo’s coping and social skills, moral compass, and loyalty. Stork ratchets up the tension as the plot winds to its memorable denouement.
Rereading The Catcher in the Rye, or any of the books discussed here that I had read as a young person, I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis’s famous adage that “no book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally — and often far more — worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” I don’t agree with him: Catcher in the Rye was far more compelling to me as an adolescent than as an adult (although its poignancy became apparent to me only in my thirties), and we can all think of examples of books that were lifelines in childhood that simply do not resonate the same way now. But Lewis was arguing for a continuity of literature that I believe has been amply demonstrated by the landmarks and exemplars Martha Parravano and I and our colleagues have provided here. While Where the Wild Things Are speaks intensely to young children about conflict and the refuge of fantasy, it also stands with any work of art that champions the imagination. Similarly, while we may now be of an age with the (almost always) patient Quimby parents rather than the put-upon Ramona, we continue to wrestle with the problem of being misunderstood. Not only can Where the Wild Things Are and Ramona the Pest continue to speak to — to grow up with — an individual reader throughout a lifetime, they also remain alive, for both children and literary culture, a half century after their publication. Ageless, then, in two ways.
We hope you do go on to read and enjoy many of the titles discussed here, and remember that they are only a taste from the feast. Whether you talk to your local librarian or bookseller, follow up on the suggestions given in this book, or peruse the lists we have on the Horn Book website (www.hbook.com), you’ll find no lack of recommendations. And if you have acquired a taste for reading about children’s literature, there is a sturdy tradition of that as well; see “Further Reading.”
The best way to understand how children read is to read for yourself. There is no need to put yourself in the shoes of a ten-year-old even if you are fifty and encountering Holes for the first time. Your own shoes will be sufficient to walk you through the story. Only by experiencing it as a reader — not a grown-up, not a parent — will you be in a position to recommend it to another: not a child, but a fellow reader.
