Youth Fiction Takes a Stark, Eerie Turn

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 31, 2000 | by Julia Duin

It's a hard, cruel world out there, judging by books aimed at the younger set. Literature for teens is full of rape, torture, demons and more -- a trend that has dominated the last decade.

Although fantasy epics like the vastly popular Harry Potter volumes are getting all the attention, the trend in teen-age literature has been toward stark, reality-based fiction. "Young-adult" books, or books aimed at readers 12 years old and over, consistently explore themes such as rape, mental illness and murder.

"Teen-agers love to read them because they're so miserable," says Ann Tobias, a children's book agent based in Arlington, Va., about "four-D books" -- her term for novels of death, divorce, drugs or dismemberment.

Much has changed in children's literature since the days of Dr. Doolittle and his talking animals. Kids' books are a universe of more than 5,000 titles a year churned out by fewer than 100 publishers for 72 million young Americans. The most popular children's books -- such as those of Dr. Seuss, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbitt and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series -- stay in print for decades.

"Escapism is great and the Harry Potter books are absolute fun, but you can't wave a wand or fly on a broomstick to solve your problems," says Dan Dailey, publisher of the children's book-review journal Five Owls. "Writers for young adults really need to show kids creative solutions. Kids are not hopeless unless you let them be that way."

The balance between fantasy, where nothing is real, and reality fiction, which can be too real, is a tough balancing act for authors. "A friend of mine scoured the news reports of all these schoolyard killings, looking for common denominators," says Dailey. "In every case, the one constant he came up with was: There was no significant adult taking a positive role in the child's life. What that says to me is that so many kids are isolated."

Consider Making Up Megaboy (DK Publishing, $16.95, 64 pp), a 1998 book by Virginia Walter. The novel concerns a 13-year-old boy who calmly walks into an inner-city grocery and kills its elderly Korean owner. A cast of narrators -- the newspaper reporter, the cop, the social worker, a teacher and his junior-high friends -- cannot fathom why the boy shot someone he didn't know, although they suspect he longs for his parents. The murderer, who remains silent, simply draws sketches of Megaboy, an imaginary superhero.

Jerry Spinelli's 1997 book Wringer (HarperCollins, $14.95, 240 pp) takes place in a small town where adults shoot thousands of birds during an annual pigeon shoot -- and boys are dispatched to wring the necks of the wounded ones. Conflict arises when a 10-year-old befriends a hungry pigeon. Helpful adults are absent from the book until the end. Adults either are dead or demonic in Han Nolan's 1997 Dancing on the Edge (Harcourt Brace, $16,256 pp), a National Book Award finalist and winner of a Parent's Choice Storybook Award. The novel opens with a Ouija board seance evoking the bloody birth of the young heroine cut from her dead mother's womb. The heroine, whose grandmother is a medium, starts casting love spells for her friends, then sets herself on fire and eventually recovers from a bout with mental illness.

Mette Newth's 1995 The Dark Light (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17, 256 pp) tells of Tora, a 13-year-old Norwegian girl dying of leprosy in a dank hospital in 19th-century Bergen. The novel is packed with reality: rotting flesh, puddles of vomit and blood, an attempted rape and amputation with no anesthetic. I Was a Teen-Age Fairy (HarperCollins, $14.05, 186 pp) by Francesca Lia Block, published last year for the 12-and-up set, addresses pedophilia and the fate of a teenage model lured into the world of drugs, sex and alcohol. Speak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16, 208 pp), a book out this fall by Laurie Halse Anderson, is about a high-school freshman who gets raped by a popular senior boy. Like the heroine in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she cannot talk about her ordeal.

"Publishers are trying to publish more of the hard-edged stuff to bring older teens into this genre," says Cathi Dunn MacRae, editor of Voice of Youth Advocates magazine. "Kids who read turn to adult books by the time they're 15. They go into John Grisham, Danielle Steele and Stephen King. They miss a lot of the stuff that truly reflects their lives."

But Dailey calls the reality trend troublesome. "A lot of it deals with just the problem aspects and there's very little wisdom in a lot of the books. I think one of the most important things in a children's book is to give them hope and help them solve challenges. Some of them just help these kids wallow in how awful life is but they don't show a way out."