So: What is Children's lit, exactly? And what is YA lit? And where do these books belong?
Surprisingly (or maybe not), the specifications of both are very contentious.
Let's start with literature for children.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica here: Children's literature is a "body of written works produced to entertain or instruct young people".
That's very neutral. No age range, no specification as to what exactly "entertainment" and "instruction" are.
Here are the criteria for the Newbery Medal, which is awarded by the American Library Association every year to "the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". They define "contribution to American literature for children" as:
a book for which children are an intended potential audience. The book displays respect for children’s understandings, abilities, and appreciations. Children are defined as persons of ages up to and including fourteen, and books for this entire age range are to be considered.
This appears to indicate that children have less understandings, abilities, and appreciations than adults. Is this true?
Parent or guardians or teachers who choose to restrict children's reading choices to shield them from dangerous and frightening things are practicing an exercise in futility. Children know that dangerous and frightening situations and people exist. Children learn history. Children live through history. The occurrence of 9-11 (or any horrors that happen often) wasn't something that could be dismissed to protect the children.
Children can appreciate books with darker themes. They may not recognize the full extent of the darkness, but they perceive the tone and feel of the book. They can read books like The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time, both Newbery winners, and know that there are bad situations and people, and learn to emphasize, and they will not be scarred for life. (Then again, The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time are books that adults can and do read as well.)
Here is a quote from Lois Lowry's Newbery acceptance speech for The Giver:
The Newbery Committee was gutsy [too]. There would have been safer books. More comfortable books. More familiar books. They took a trip beyond the realm of sameness, with this one, and I think they should be very proud of that.
And all of you, as well. Let me say something to those of you here who do such dangerous work.
The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.
It is very risky.
But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom.
Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
And all of you, as well. Let me say something to those of you here who do such dangerous work.
The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.
It is very risky.
But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom.
Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
Now, there are cases in which children's understandings are limited. In my opinion, any book which contains sexual material is inappropriate for children. Not because we're trying to keep them stupid, but because they aren't mature enough to understand it yet.
Here is part of children's librarian Elizabeth Bird's review of The King of Attolia:
Here is part of children's librarian Elizabeth Bird's review of The King of Attolia:
It all comes down to this: You can’t understand this book if you don’t know why a man would fall in love with the woman who cut off his hand.
She goes on to say that while she can't recommend it to her readers, if she were a teen librarian, she'd be pushing it onto her teens.
Children usually don't have the emotional maturity to understand love, either. I would say that there is no possibility of a child understanding Gen and Irene's relationship. That's not to say that children should be condescended to. It just means that adult authors can't write about adult experiences for children, because children are not ready to understand them.
Here's a quote from Madeleine L'Engle, just to put things into perspective: "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
Children usually don't have the emotional maturity to understand love, either. I would say that there is no possibility of a child understanding Gen and Irene's relationship. That's not to say that children should be condescended to. It just means that adult authors can't write about adult experiences for children, because children are not ready to understand them.
Here's a quote from Madeleine L'Engle, just to put things into perspective: "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
Here's an article from the Washington University in St. Louis website quoting Gerald Early:
Children's literature exists as an idea in the adult mind about the ways one speaks to children, about how we adults configure childhood. Children's literature celebrates the imagination we think is necessary for us to engage childhood as adults. It is a way for adults, in short, to distinguish children from adults.
We understand the customs and practices of the genre so well that we can usually spot a children's book without having to be told... But a children's book, as with virtually all of our thinking about children, has reality only in relation to how we see something that is not for children. If something is for children, it does not have sex, it does not have graphic violence, it does not have obscene language.
We understand the customs and practices of the genre so well that we can usually spot a children's book without having to be told... But a children's book, as with virtually all of our thinking about children, has reality only in relation to how we see something that is not for children. If something is for children, it does not have sex, it does not have graphic violence, it does not have obscene language.
And, interestingly, he continues:
At their best, books aimed at children express how adults feel conflicted about their childhood — and how this feeling reflects an ambivalence that children, too, feel about childhood. That is why this literature speaks to adults as well as to children. As adults, we never outgrow childhood. We learn to live with what our childhoods have made us.
Now for YA. Because of the recent growth of the young adult genre, its specifications have been debated a lot lately. Here are the criteria for the Michael L. Printz Award, which is awarded to "the best young adult book ("best" being defined solely in terms of literary merit)".To be eligible, a title must have been designated by its publisher as being either a young adult book or one published for the age range that YALSA defines as "young adult," i.e., 12 through 18. Adult books are not eligible.
That's an extremely vague explanation. How does a publisher or YALSA determine what books should be published for 12-18 year olds?
Here's a post from Cheryl Klein, an editor at a division of Scholastic, who blogs at Brooklyn Arden:
- A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of
- its teenage protagonist(s),
- whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the
- story,
- and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.
1) "centrally interested": The book's central storyline focuses upon the emotional, intellectual, and all other forms of experience and growth of its main character. It may be interested in other things as well -- dragons, the definition of justice, life in 1908 Russia -- but all of those interests are secondary to the experience of the main character, and usually filtered only through him/her.
This is often where I find adult books separating themselves out here, because while they may have a younger protagonist, the adult books aren't interested in that protagonist's life per se -- they're interested in showing the world the protagonist will encounter in all its ugliness or glory, and a younger character often provides a useful "innocent" or "naive" viewpoint, or at the very least a figure of instant sympathy to adults.
"growth" -- the character is different at the beginning than he is at the end, and usually for the better. I always think of Richard Peck's wise dictum that a YA novel ends "ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived"; and that the events of the book have left the character better prepared for that.
2) "teenage protagonist(s)": Yeah, I'm going to posit that YA novels require a protagonist at an adolescent stage of life, between childhood and the full rights and privileges of adulthood. I do not think this is true of children's books, particularly picture books (that is, that they must have a child main character); but I think it's true of teen books, because life between the ages of 14-18 is such a unique time, full of so much intensity and so many firsts, that only a very sheltered adult or a very advanced child could have those same sorts of experiences and changes.
This is often where I find adult books separating themselves out here, because while they may have a younger protagonist, the adult books aren't interested in that protagonist's life per se -- they're interested in showing the world the protagonist will encounter in all its ugliness or glory, and a younger character often provides a useful "innocent" or "naive" viewpoint, or at the very least a figure of instant sympathy to adults.
"growth" -- the character is different at the beginning than he is at the end, and usually for the better. I always think of Richard Peck's wise dictum that a YA novel ends "ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived"; and that the events of the book have left the character better prepared for that.
2) "teenage protagonist(s)": Yeah, I'm going to posit that YA novels require a protagonist at an adolescent stage of life, between childhood and the full rights and privileges of adulthood. I do not think this is true of children's books, particularly picture books (that is, that they must have a child main character); but I think it's true of teen books, because life between the ages of 14-18 is such a unique time, full of so much intensity and so many firsts, that only a very sheltered adult or a very advanced child could have those same sorts of experiences and changes.
Now, I think there's debate about exactly how old Gen is, but I also think that most, if not all, readers consider him an adult. He has the responsibilities of an adult: he has a job he feels obligated to fulfill, he loves a woman, he gets married, he runs a country. He may do it in an extremely original way, but there's no question but that he's an adult. Even if he's a teenager, which I don't think he is, he's beyond typical teenage adolescence. These YA criteria do not apply.
More on YA from Patty Campell's 2004 article in the Horn Book magazine, quoted in author Gail Gauthier's blog here:
The central theme of YA fiction is becoming an adult, finding the answer to the question "Who am I, and what am I going to do about it?" Whether it is told in first or third (or even second person), to be a YA novel a book must have a teen protagonist speaking from an adolescent point of view, with all the limitations of understanding this implies. To be a YA novel, then, a book must have a climactic epiphany of new maturity as the subtext and be told in the YA voice from the limited adolescent viewpoint. In addition, it must be relevant to the lives of young readers in some way.
From author Justine Larbalestier here:
Part of the problem with defining Young Adult fiction is that it’s a category defined by its audience in a way that “science fiction” or “romance” or “mysteries” or even “literature” is not.
Defining a genre in terms of its presumed audience is a problem. Especially when that audience is something as nebulous as “teenagers”.
So, yes, YA is a publishing category and books are published there if that’s where a publisher thinks a book will sell best and attract the most attention. But it’s also a distinctive genre with its own flavour.
Defining a genre in terms of its presumed audience is a problem. Especially when that audience is something as nebulous as “teenagers”.
So, yes, YA is a publishing category and books are published there if that’s where a publisher thinks a book will sell best and attract the most attention. But it’s also a distinctive genre with its own flavour.
She does not explain what she means when she says that YA is a distinctive genre.
More from author Gayle Forman here:
Traditionally, YA covered the ages of 12-18 but ... there is the whole sub-genre of upper-YA. When I told my editor that my characters who were teens in If I Stay now were not, her concern wasn’t their ages but that they needed to be on the “precipice” of some major life change. I don’t think 30 can be YA, but 20 can. The term is young adult. Not teen.
A YA novel will feature characters/narrator with a certain voice that sounds young, feels young, authentically so.
A YA novel will feature characters/narrator with a certain voice that sounds young, feels young, authentically so.
We tend to consider the YA readership to be 14 or 15+ (often extending into early 20s). But more important than age range, YA fiction tends to address the emotional intensity that is a teenager's journey through the often bewildering waters of adolescence. This life-stage is all about change - and the experience is often isolating and confusing.
So YA fiction is often about a world in flux. It's about exploring this new world, or surviving it, or simply trying to navigate it without a compass.
And it's the YA books that capture the authenticity of this see-saw between strength and vulnerability that resonate most with readers.
So YA characters are often consumed by these questions: 'Who am I? What am I going to become? Where am I going and how can I possibly get there from here?' Their emotions and desires are intense and can have a huge impact on how they make decisions and which pathways they choose.
Books for adults often have young protagonists, but this doesn't mean they are YA books.... A young protagonist in an adult novel is usually knowing and has an adult sensibility in their telling of the story.
So YA fiction is often about a world in flux. It's about exploring this new world, or surviving it, or simply trying to navigate it without a compass.
And it's the YA books that capture the authenticity of this see-saw between strength and vulnerability that resonate most with readers.
So YA characters are often consumed by these questions: 'Who am I? What am I going to become? Where am I going and how can I possibly get there from here?' Their emotions and desires are intense and can have a huge impact on how they make decisions and which pathways they choose.
Books for adults often have young protagonists, but this doesn't mean they are YA books.... A young protagonist in an adult novel is usually knowing and has an adult sensibility in their telling of the story.
Here's what Orson Scott Card wrote about The King of Attolia:
...this book isn't [is] "young adult." Yes, a couple of main characters are young - but in an era when they could already function in adult roles. And I wonder if this book might be too sophisticated for a lot of young readers. Not because of sex, for the book shows none, but because Turner writes about small-kingdom politics at a very high level.
But then, there is no place in our society where personal politics is carried on with more ruthlessness and intensity than junior high school. No matter how much childish behavior you find in Congress or university faculties, image-building, character-assassination, and jockeying for position reach their peak among seventh and eighth graders. So this novel may be exactly right for that age group.
It's also an adult book, however - an unusually entertaining and intelligent one - and I recommend it highly. Give the gross-out thrillers a break and pick up something that will actually exercise your brain and leave you feeling rather good about being human.
I think what I said above about Gen is still true. He's not emotionally an adolescent, and Eddis and Attolia are definitely not. Think about how Ornon respects Gen, and the magus, and Sounis, and Attolia. He's an individual fully cognizant of his abilities and capable of making his own decisions and living with the consequences. He's an adult.So, in conclusion: The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia (I'm actually not sure if I can include A Conspiracy of Kings; Sophos seems to be a traditional YA protagonist)
a) don't belong on the Children's shelf
b) don't belong on the Young Adult shelf
Where do they go, exactly? I still agree with the blogger who called it "a riveting political drama", and for all my Googling, I haven't found which blogger it was. So I can't credit it, though I think it's exactly right. They're in a genre of their own.
Thoughts?