My librarian friend once confessed two of her favorite guilty pleasures: killing a bottle of wine while watching Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer and bringing home a stack of new young adult books to read before they get catalogued.

She’s not the only adult I know who enjoys reading books for children or teens. Another fellow librarian was special-ordering Harry Potter books from England long before the craze caught on here. My friend Ruth, whose kids have been out of training pants for quite some time now, can quote large chunks of Peter Rabbit. Books for younger kids appeal because the worlds they evoke are often colorful and magical and almost always simpler than the world most of us live in. Bad guys may threaten, but they’re usually down for the count by the last page. Order is restored, and happiness reigns.

Books for teenagers are another matter. The issues at hand get a little darker, villains and heroes aren’t so clearly divided, knowing the right thing to do is a lot harder, and sometimes even doing the right thing doesn’t mean a happy ending. It wasn’t always that way. In my own “young adult” years, reading young adult novels was a thing to be avoided, like being seen in public with a parent. Except for Judy Blume and The Outsiders, most of the “teen books” I ran across in my town’s library were yellowed relics from the Leave it to Beaver era, things with titles like Suddenly Sixteen or Junior Miss, which, as I recall, devoted an entire chapter to the process of buying a coat.

Not so today. Writers of contemporary young adult fiction are more likely to take on topics like heroin addiction (Melvin Burgess, Smack), serious mental illness (Norma Fox Mazer, When She Was Good), sexual identity issues (M.E. Kerr, ‘Hello,’ I Lied), or teen parenthood (Sarah Dessen, Someone Like You). The writing is also much more sophisticated—although short and snappy still rules in Teen Lit World. It’s pretty rare to find a YA novel that can’t be read in a night or two. The pace is fast, and the treatment of theme, while it can be complex, is still fairly direct: few YA novels I’ve yet encountered are fraught with hidden symbolism. In fact, there’s a funny riff on the latter in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, when a high school student tired of picking apart the carcass of The Scarlet Letter asks why Hawthorne didn’t just say what he meant. The average YA novel doesn’t require a month-long commitment, but the best of them will linger in the mind long after the last page.

Teen Angst, Teen Death

Is it hormones? Cafeteria food? Childhood innocence taking a kamikaze run at adult cynicism? Something about high school brings on gloom in a big way. It’s all pretty funny if you’re not going through it, and sometimes it’s even funny when you are. Here are some books that take on weighty subjects while avoiding TV-movie cheeseballness.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky: I think as many adults as teenagers have loved this novel. It’s a little bit Salinger as Charlie, the first-person narrator, writes letters to an unknown friend describing his life from the day he hears about a friend’s suicide on the high school loudspeaker to the day he’s released from the hospital. The novel is dark, but also humorous and filled with quirky, dead-on observations of small things.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak features another great first-person narrator in the person of Melinda, a jaded high school freshman: “The first 10 lies they tell you in high school: 1. We are here to help you. 2. You will have enough time to get to class before the bell rings. … 10. These will be the years you look back on fondly.” Melinda’s journal of her school year details her growing alienation at school and at home. She called the cops at a summer party and now everyone hates her, so she retreats into herself and her silence, pouring all her unspoken thoughts into her journal. Melinda’s witty sarcasm saves this from bathos, and when she finds her voice at last, it feels like a triumph well earned.

The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci. The class dork, Christopher Creed, disappears from a New Jersey suburb, and one of the popular kids Creed envied becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to him. I like this first novel’s inversion of norms: the more Torey, the narrator, is drawn into the lives of Creed and two other outsider characters, the more he comes to question his own “inside” status and the dishonesty of the adult and teen world. Nothing is as it seems, and while we can’t help but feel that learning this will ultimately make Torey a more interesting person, the path toward truth is a painful journey to take.

Vicky Angel by Jacqueline Wilson is a younger, but not at all shallow treatment of loss and grief. Jade’s colorful, domineering best friend Vicky is killed in an accident while the girls are arguing, and Jade is devastated. Vicky’s reappearance as a ghost seems to make things better for a while, but soon ghost-Vicky is making Jade’s life even more miserable, controlling her every action, preventing her from getting close to anyone else. What I like about Vicky Angel is that unlike, say, gothic authoress Ann Radcliffe or the scripters of Scooby-Doo cartoons, Wilson does not feel compelled to ‘explain away’ the ghost at the end. We can believe that the ectoplasmic Vicky is a projection of Jade’s grief and guilt, but we’re not made to.

The Dysfunctional Parents Sub-Genre

Born Blue by Han Nolan. Janie is a white girl who falls in love with black women singing the blues and renames herself Leshaya, after the daughter of a black social worker who was kind to her. Kindness is a rare quantity in Leshaya’s world: after some time in a neglectful foster home, she’s “sold” by her junkie mom to a drug dealer and his girlfriend as a substitute for the girlfriend’s dead daughter. After they’re busted, she finds her way back to Harmon, her friend from the foster home, and is offered a home with his adoptive family, but eventually she betrays their trust and runs away, a pattern she continues with other people who try to get close to her. Leshaya has become dishonest and manipulative, alternately self-destructive and self-aggrandizing, and her first-person narration leaves enough room to read between the lines as we hear her justifying bad behavior. Eventually Leshaya, now a singer, reconciles with her mother, who’s dying of AIDS, and she comes to recognize her mother’s mistakes in her own—both are “bridge burners,” as a nurse tells Leshaya. I like that Nolan shows Leshaya making bad decisions and living with the consequences of her actions, but Leshaya’s first-person narration, a kind of Alice Walker Lite, can get annoying.

A Door Near Here, by Heather Quarles, features a heroine who’s nothing like Leshaya. Instead, she’s one of those super-mature teenagers who become the parent they don’t have. When Katherine’s alcoholic, depressed mom pulls a Brian Wilson, it’s up to her to pay the bills, keep her younger siblings fed, and make sure they get to school. Her divorced father is uninvolved, and she’s sure that if anyone finds out that Mom hasn’t bothered to get out of bed for several months, she and her brother and sisters will be split up and sent to foster homes. It’s hard not to read this book in one sitting: things get more desperate, the tension grows, and Alisa, Katherine’s youngest sister, talks constantly about escaping into the fantasy world of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. When a kind teacher tries to help, Katherine is terrified he’ll find out. This novel is realistic about bad decisions and their consequences, but it also offers testimony to the power of forgiveness and redemption. Highly recommended for teens and adults.

But certainly the dysfunctional parent novel to end all dysfunctional parent novels is Martyn Pig by Kevin Brooks, a writer whose resume I can’t help but love. Mr. Brooks formerly worked in a railroad station, the London Zoo, and a crematorium. Presumably all of these, but especially the last, qualified him to write Martyn Pig, the story of a boy whose life is as unfortunate as his name. Not only is Martyn’s dad a violent, drunken lout, he also drops dead in Chapter One, leaving Martyn, a Raymond Chandler fan, to do some intricate maneuvering to keep the authorities and his even more unpleasant Aunty Jean from finding out. This includes a blackly comical, Weekend at Bernie’s-style charade involving Aunty Jean, Martyn, his (girl) friend Alex, Dead Dad, and some tape-recorded snoring. The book is genuinely funny, although the going gets grimmer as we go along. Martyn’s voice is genuine and appealing, and we want things to turn out right for him despite, or perhaps because of, the grotesqueness of his situation.

Boy Meets Girl

Yes, still. But things can get a bit complicated here, as well, especially when the girl is a lesbian, as in Ellen Wittlinger’s Hard Love. Gio has been left to fend for himself emotionally after his parents’ divorce: his father can barely talk to him, and his mother shies away from touching him. He finds a way to break through his alienation in the world of zines, and he develops a close friendship with Marisol, a fellow zine writer and self-proclaimed lesbian. But the closer Gio gets to Marisol, the less her sexual orientation seems to matter—at least to him. There are a lot of things to like in this novel, but one thing I especially like is the way artistic creation is shown as central to the lives of both characters. We get to “see” their zines on the page—funky typography, illustrations and all—as windows into what the characters are thinking and feeling. Will Marisol be Gio’s prom date? Will Gio confront his mother about her emotional abandonment? Will true love conquer mere biology? The answer to at least one of these questions is yes.

In And Sometimes Why by Mame Farrell, the relationship isn’t quite so challenging. It’s a familiar situation, at least to those conversant with the film oeuvre of John Hughes: boy and girl are old friends; boy suddenly notices that tomboy girl is not so tomboy anymore; can boy and girl still be friends, or will they be something more? Farrell tweaks the convention a little, making us ask: is ‘more’ always better? She writes refreshingly about regular kids dealing with the everyday challenges of growing up, and I like the honest dialog. A book I’d recommend to middle school students.

Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote convincingly about teenage girls in her short stories Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been has just published her first novel for young adults (presumably written in her spare time, between knocking out two 800-page novels last month). Big Mouth & Ugly Girl takes on the highly charged topic of school violence. It’s an intriguing look at the masks and distancing techniques people use to get through high school and a convincing rendering of the rocky start of a relationship between an unlikely couple.

Books About Normal, Well-Adjusted Teens Who Love Their Parents, Have Tons of Friends, Succeed in School, and Sail Through Adolescence Unscathed

Isn’t it depressing enough that these people exist? Do we really want to read books about them?

Probably not. But, for those who prefer adolescence sunny side up, the aforementioned And Sometimes Why, Ann Brasheares’ The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the Louise Rennison books (Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God, and the latest, Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas, and Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here are relatively low-angst titles without a high saccharine content. I’m especially fond of Louise Rennison’s trio, written journal-style, sort of the girl equivalent of Sue Townsend’s classic Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 1/2. Rennison’s novels have also been compared to Bridget Jones’s Diary, but somehow it’s less embarrassing to see a female character constantly obsessing about boys and her looks when said female character is 14, not 34.

Adult Novels Recommended for Young Adults

Finally, here’s a short list of books written for adults that have strong adolescent point-of-view characters and could definitely be enjoyed by teenage readers.

Crazy As Chocolate by Elizabeth Hyde: Izzy’s 41st birthday brings up painful memories of her mother, who committed suicide on her own 41st birthday, when Izzy was twelve.
Diamond Dogs by Alan Watts: A high school football star commits a crime, and his sheriff father covers it up.
The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver: An 11-year-old kleptomaniac stirs up a nest of bees as well as some disturbing family secrets.
Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson: Classic story of a flamboyant, intense mother and her hold over her daughter’s life.
Snow Angels by Stewart O’Nan: A 15-year-old copes with his parent’s divorce and the tragic drowning of his favorite childhood babysitter’s daughter.

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As a librarian, Kathryn Kulpa gets to read new young adult novels before anyone else does. She also served as senior editor of Merlyn’s Pen and has edited several collections of writing by young adults, including Something Like a Hero: Stories of Daring and Decision, Short Takes: Brief Personal Narratives, and Taking Off: And Other Coming of Age Stories. She has published fiction recently in Bellevue Literary Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review and has a short story forthcoming in Carve.

copyright © 2002 Kathryn Kulpa. All rights reserved.

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