I was very kindly asked to expand my views on teen fiction and it seems to me that the question above is the right one to start with. Not because it's a terribly difficult question to answer. The answer is plain and simple and the answer is "No".
No one needs teen fiction. Children's fiction serves several different roles including, among others, bonding with parents and learning language. By the time you get to be a teen, the bonding function is accomplished with other things (and often against your will as you would prefer to be alone in your room) and the books you need for learning are all supplied by your school. Reading for a teen is a purely decadent activity. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
And some kids, I was one of them, start reading fiction the way other kids eat potato chips and drink soft drinks. Huge amounts of fiction are run through. My nieces and nephews grew up with Harry Potter and they and their mothers would stand in line to get the new volume on a Monday and then they'd go home and disappear into their rooms and come to breakfast on Wednesday morning having consumed the whole thing. They'd consume four, five, six, seven hundred or even a thousand pages a week if it was available.
I call this sort of reading book-diving. It's done for no other reason than that it feels good. You just plunge into the book and disappear. It might be doing you some good to be doing all that reading but that thought never occurs to you. You pick these books up and you start reading. You can tell within pages whether it's going to give you the experience you want and, if it will, you dive right in and don't come out for days.
What you are looking for I'll get to tomorrow but suffice to note here that it isn't elegant prose, carefully constructed plots, brilliant metaphors or deep insights into the human condition. You tear through this stuff always more interested in the next page than the one you're on.
Teen fiction exists solely to meet the desires of girls and boys like my nieces and nephews. Especially girls. By teen years, girls have already distinguished themselves as much heavier readers of fiction than boys. Some women never stop reading teen fiction. Some market analysts estimate that one third of the teen fiction sold is purchased by adults for themselves. And an awful lot of the novels that women do read as adults is just teen fiction transposed to an adult setting the way a lot of science fiction is just cowboy fiction transposed into space, "the final frontier". New York is just one big high school for the Sex-and-the-City girls.
And one of the big themes of all teen fiction is the lead character's efforts to both belong to and differentiate herself from various groups—a big high school preoccupation. The other big theme is ... well, let's leave that until tomorrow and consider first the giant distortion.
Fixing the market
If you look at the NPR list, one of the first things to strike you is that some of these books and series are on the list because they pretty much have to be; The Harry Potter books,
The Hunger Games and
The Twilight series. What distinguishes these books is the sales. Harry Potter and
The Twilight books have probably each individually sold more copies over the last ten years than all the other books on the NPR list put together.
And that is important to keep in mind because these books are in an entirely different category than the others. They are the books that teens read and reread as much as they can. The rest, well, the rest is a lot like the sort of stuff that the hard core sports fan will watch when there isn't a really big football, basketball or hockey game to watch but he wants to watch something.
A lot of others are perennial classics, the Tolkien books, the Bradbury books,
To Kill a Mockingbird. These are also there because kids keep reading them despite busybodies best efforts to the contrary. You can bet that an awfully lot of teen girls would have voted for Jane Austen if they'd been given the chance too.
Most of the other books on the list got there largely through attempts to distort the game by adults. One trick, which I noted in the previous post, is that the vote was fixed by an expert panel. They excluded as much of the stuff that teens actually want to read as they possibly could—you'll notice for example, that the
Gossip Girl books were excluded from the nomination list.
By the way, how much you want to bet that a lot more teens are devouring
Fifty Shades of Grey than are plodding through any of the worthy teen fiction preferred by the "expert panel" who narrowed down the NPR list? When I was a teen, girls just gobbled up
The Fountainhead and it was an open secret that the rape scene was a big part of the attraction. But you can be sure that no librarian is going want to let them vote for "a book like that". We can't let girls admit they like reading books about being sexually submissive and we don't want to think too much about why girls are drawn to such stories in the first place.
Meanwhile, it is a lot easier for adult busybodies to make the kinds of books they wish teens were reading look popular than you might guess. You see, the thing is that there are a lot of libraries out there and a book can get to be quite a bestseller simply by appealing to librarians and other busybodies who want to impose their ideas of what would make good teen fiction on kids. If every library in the country buys your book, you have it made.
And some actual book-diving teens will read it because they crave books and go looking for them. Well, they'll read a few pages anyway. They may not read it all the way.
If you've read Graham Greene's
The Heart of the Matter, you'll remember the scene where the hero is asked to read to a sick boy and the book he gets stuck reading is a horrible bit of "improving" fiction called
A Bishop Among the Bantus. Well, however horrible that book may have been, it couldn't possibly be as awful a prospect as
The Book Thief:
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the
story of Liesel — a young German girl whose book-stealing and
storytelling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are
hiding, as well as their neighbors.
That is a book that an adult picks for a kid. Many of the kids it is picked for will think, "Kill me now before I have to read it".
(By the way, notice how
The Book Thief sets up the moral issues: it's about a "young German girl" and her family who are protecting a Jewish man and who are apparently near starvation. This picks up the treatment of WW2 a lot of intellectuals seem to prefer these days wherein the good Germans are victims of some weird subgroup called Nazis who take over as opposed to actually facing that they might be individually and collectively responsible for what happened.))
Having described what makes a lot of recommended teen fiction awful, I'll turn to what makes the illicit kind so damn good tomorrow.
