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Problems, paperbacks, and the Printz: forty years of YA books.

Article Excerpt
I read adult books before I read young adult books. This is partly due to my age. I was eleven in 1967 when The Outsiders, the most direct ancestor of contemporary YA--and much of today's children's literature--was published. Although we tend to forget it today, there were plenty of books published for teenagers after the Second World War. Mary Stolz, who died late last year, was one of the most expert and sophisticated practitioners of the "junior novel."

But I didn't know about her until I went to library school. The mainstay of my middle-grade reading was Reader's Digest Condensed Books. As a child I was afraid to fall asleep at night; I was afraid to lie down, because sometimes the position could trigger an asthma attack. That's why I became a reader, and there were plenty of those Reader's Digest suckers around. They had a lot of ER-like doctor dramas. There was a great one about a woman who paid a hit man to kill her because she has a brain tumor, but guess what? MISTAKEN DIAGNOSIS. That's also where I discovered James Michener--they always had his books--and, liking the excerpt from Hawaii so much, I went out and got the whole book from the library. Do you remember the hot scene on the boat where the seemingly prim Jerusha Bromley coaxes her stiff-necked missionary husband Abner into the berth one afternoon? Yowza. There were absolutely no details, but it gave me plenty to go on. Jerusha also had this hunky whaling captain ex-boyfriend, Rafe or something, and the Reader's Digest illustration--they had pictures, remember?--gave him the full hottie treatment. There was another about which all I can remember is the title--The Success--and that it was kind of an Updike-lite story about a woman disappointed in her marriage. If it was a movie it would have starred Julianne Moore. Probably foreshadowing my adult passion for Judith Krantz, I was drawn to what seemed its glittering sophistication, but frustrated by how much I didn't get--not the vocabulary or story, but the motivations that drove it. I was too young for ennui.

But let's stop a minute to think about what we've just learned about young adult readers, whom I'm going to define as a continuum of ten- to eighteen-year-olds, because, depending on the kid and the era, that's who reads young adult books.

First, at least one kid (me) was reading adult books, an activity that however common and persistent nevertheless remains a contentious player in the YA game. Second, look at the hooks: suspense and drama, sex and story. I wanted strong narratives and didn't mind rudimentary characterization.

I don't mean to make this all about me. I'm aware that as a reading adolescent I was in a minority. Former Horn Book editor Ethel Heins used to say--with a blitheness that today would be astounding--that the Horn Book reviewed books for "the reading child." I was one of those, and I would contend that the tension between serving readers and creating readers is the basis of the YA argument, the central dynamic of young adult literature and librarianship.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT YOU. I began junior high in 1968, just as the second wave of young adult literature began, with S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders and Paul Zindel's The Pigman. But I didn't see these books until a few years later, when they established themselves in paperback and became staples of school book-ordering clubs like Scholastic's. My brother John, just a year older, was hooked on these things, but I admitted to reading them only with snobbish guilty-pleasure. I knew, through something unspoken but understood, that they were for kids who weren't really readers, as I understood the term. I looked at them as hi-los, to resurrect an old term. But it is true that they could speak to me with an intensity and directness different from what I was getting from adult fiction. In The Outsiders, I wanted to be a part of the family Darry built. I had an enormous crush on Jesse, the deep and studious lame girl in Lois Duncan's Five Were Missing (also titled Ransom); ditto for the elegant and inconsolable and oh-so-French Roger, an adult character in Kin Platt's The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear. I read these books over and over.

In the 1970s, one of the rationales for "the problem novel" was that it spoke to kids "relevantly" and...

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