Twitter is afire with the #YAsaves hashtag and various young-adult fiction authors (and readers) angry about the latest old-fogey rant to fill a few lonely column inches before a deadline; this time, a Wall Street Journal book reviewer is determined to prove that the boys on the editorial page don’t hold that newspaper’s monopoly on stupid.
Meghan Cox Gurdon, a former conservative columnist for the National Review and the Washington Examiner, somehow managed to slither her way into a berth reviewing children’s books for the WSJ. Predictably, her complaint is that YA fiction these days is just awful and ugly and brutal, not like the gentle, sun-touched fiction for teenagers of our own youth.
Which, setting aside the pearl-clutching, is really where I stopped. Our youth? Yes, you heard that right; as with everything else worthy in life, children’s literature was destroyed by those awful 1960s, and children’s literature turned to the Dark Side forty years ago. Apparently Gurdon’s outrage has affected her math skills; the “46-year-old mother of three” she fusses over in her opening paragraph would have barely been in kindergarten in 1967, and would have been exposed to that “dark” YA literature in her own teenage years. As would all, if not most, of Generation X. You know, the people who are now getting middle-aged and raising kids and thus supposedly having to worry about the terrible YA literature that awaits our young’uns, and the same people who grew up with that “dark” fiction of the terrible post-1960s lurking in the bookstores.
If Gurdon’s column were factual, it would be trivial to point out that there is plenty of YA fiction that isn’t “dark”, and is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff we had available as kids; I’d have loved to have Leviathan or Zoe’s Tale or White Cat to read when I was a teenager, and none of those are exactly on the level of Go Ask Alice as far as “dark” fiction went.
But it’s not. She’s simply regurgitating a pearl-clutching rant about Kids These Days and how much better things were in the innocent days of our own youth, and throwing on a steaming sprinkle of conservative ranting about how the culture imploded once those goddamn hippies showed up. Which is a pity, because it seems like even the Twilight books would be a refreshing breath of air for kids otherwise stuck listening to their mom rant about the culture wars.
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