More Than Once Upon a Time

And here I am, ostensibly a writer of YA. Bah, humbug.

I actually don’t read much YA, but I just finished Little Brother so YA is on my mind. I didn’t much like the book, not so much because of the book itself but because it’s YA. I know, I know, YA is the hot thing right now, but that still doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The main reason I don’t like YA is because of the way it’s often written. It’s just not to my taste. The POVs are generally too tight; the narrators are too often Mary Sues; the issues are far too simplified; the adults are all idiots. Even more importantly, I have a built-in bias that makes me wince at the word YA. When I grew up in the ’60s you went from children’s books to adult books whenever you were ready. For most readers that was about the time they hit adolescence. YA at the time was a new marketing niche being promoted as books with adult themes written for teens who weren’t yet ready (or able) to read adult books.

Needless to say, as a teenager I turned my nose up at the idea of reading anything that was described as being written for teens not yet ready to read something harder.

I don’t really have anything against YA per se. Hey, the more books people like, the better. But most of the techniques I don’t like in YA are the sorts of techniques used to make books easier to read and more accessible. Which means that, unless the writer is really, really good, books written with those techniques often end up being simplistic and banal. In Little Brother, for example, the interpretation of the Declaration of Indepence given in the book is one that literally justifies all acts of defiance against the government as being justifiable, which is, of course an impossible simplification. But it’s just the sort of impossible simplification that finds it’s way into a lot of YA.

Which is why I don’t like YA.