So you might have heard about all that criticizing of “sick lit,” which is the new buzzword for adults who think they know about YA from having looked at synopses (you can always tell how invalidated these people’s arguments are when the comments are closed and the person has no experience as a librarian, writer, teacher, or scholar of the stuff, as you can see here). “Sick lit” has replaced Meghan Cox Gurdon’s ridiculous “Darkness Too Visible” article on the Wall Street Journal as the way to demonize YA for teaching teens that bad things happen in the world. They are written by people who know so little about children’s literature as to say things like “so-called ‘young adult’ (YA) fiction” (seriously, Russell Smith? A publishing category around for decades is just so-called? Anyway) and who think that a book published in the last five years was the first to “break the taboo about writing about suicide” (Tanith Carey). Basically, these people spent five minutes looking at YA and determined themselves experts, which I suppose is the same as men holding panels on reproductive rights and barring women from saying “vagina,” or politicians who have never been in classrooms telling teachers how to teach. This is about people with hegemonic power trying to keep it at all costs.
Of course, the real thing that these “concerned” adults are decrying is the idea that novels for teenagers might be something other than didactic and for an audience other than upper-middle-class white people with problems that cannot be easily solved with a little Kumbaya or finding true love that accepts you for who you are. There are scholarly articles about this, too, because people cannot get enough of criticizing these sick lit novels. And they have a point, to an extent – it is ridiculous when your novel hinges entirely on a kid with cancer and lacks, you know, a real plot, characterization, and compelling other things going on. But when these conversations move from Lurlene McDaniel to people with slightly more literary prowess, it gets ridiculous, because they are criticizing the wrong part of sick lit: the presentation of teenagers as people with serious difficulties in life instead of the problem novel-iness of it all. Continue reading →
sarah HANNAH gómez 