The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit

Judging from The New York Times children’s best-seller list and librarian-approved selections like the annual “Best Books for Young Adults,” the bad parent is now enjoying something of a heyday. It would be hard to come up with an exact figure from the thousands of Y.A. novels published every year, but what’s striking is that some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.

Sometimes the parents are very, very busy, and sometimes they’ve simply checked out. The husband of the accident-prone mother is never home at night. It’s not that he’s with another woman; he’s working late at the Johns Hopkins bio lab. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s best-selling “Wintergirls,” about a dangerously anorexic high school senior, the mom is a sought-after surgeon too pressed to notice that her malnourished daughter is a bit shorter than she was four years earlier.

Like the clownish adults on the Disney Channel or “Modern Family,” the not-in-charge, curiously diminished parent is just sort of there, part of the scenery. You can even spot the type in three best-selling fantasy series: “Twilight,” “Shiver” and “The Hunger Games.” In “Twilight,” the only reason Bella meets the supernaturally good-looking Edward in the first place is that she has moved to her father’s place in gloomy Forks, Wash.; that way, her mother can follow around after her new husband, a minor-league ballplayer. “I stared at her wild, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic hare-brained mother to fend for herself?” (Edward’s own parents are charming, competent and rich, but they are vampires.)

Afflicted by anomie, sitting down to another dismal meal or rushing out the door to a meeting, the hapless parents of Y.A.

LOTR and Watership Down didn’t make their writers royalty rich. They were successful books, and over the long haul might be more successful than Potter, but over the short term, which is really what publishers are thinking about, they’ve got nothing on Potter, or it’s “predecessor” Goosebumps, or “successor” Twilight. These books series are licenses to print money.

It’s not just a matter of the books being “about children”, you can make a protagonist any age you like, it’s a matter of the books being about children that other children can understand. Children facing children problems. Trying to find their place in the world, dealing with being “different”, not feeling their parents understand them or are fair. It’s not the strength of the reader or the language, it’s the CONTENT being within the kids world view. LOTR is a brilliant book, and has great lessons for kids, but there really aren’t kid issues. Same with Watership Down. I read all those when I was tween age, but there was no identifying with them, nobody in those books was me. And that’s what’s driving the current push, authors have finally figured out how to put in characters that kid/ YA reader can not just like but UNDERSTAND.

I didn’t touch YA books unless I had too with a ten foot pole (We had these points we had to earn for reading books and taking tests and so I’m sure I read some). I couldn’t stand them. Books like Andersonville and Dune series were my playground in middle school and High School.

I felt the same way. When I was in high school, I read only one YA novel, Don Robertson's The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (Fawcett, 1967), and it was a pretty good read. My favorite authors included Martin Caidin and Robert Leckie, who wrote non-fiction books on military topics.

Among I also read on my own at the age of 16 were General Claire L. Chennault's autobiography Way of a Fighter (G. P. Putnam's, 1949), Hector C. Bywater's fictional The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), and Up Ship! by Charles E. Rosendahl (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), a book about airships, copies of which are now worth beaucoup bucks.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.