Literary Quality

“The dirty little secret of a great deal of YA reviewing is that the reader the adult has in mind is a female teenage bookworm quite similar to the person that reviewer once was.” Aronson, p. 118

“If a book wins an award, everybody’s going to be reading that, mainly young adults. It’s like, this won the Printz Award, it’s got to be good. They’re going to pick it up and say ‘this is kind of boring, maybe reading isn’t all that good. If this was the best book out of all the young adult books published this year and it’s not that good, then maybe we should just stop reading.’” – Megan S. (Clare Horne’s article)

Both of these quotes resonated with me, because I think they represent the crux of the YA quality debate. Quality can’t merely be determined by popularity, but does it make sense to select the “best” books without any regard to how accessible and exciting they are?

A book like Rot and Ruin is written with the kind of straightforward, deceptively plain language that allows the reader to “fall inside” the story. It’s a highly engaging novel, and teens evidently connect with it, if the Eva Perry Book Club is representative of the broader population. Yet it doesn’t receive the kind of critical attention one might expect.

You could argue that Rot and Ruin is “just a zombie” book, that it’s too silly to receive a Big Serious Award. But I think Rot and Ruin explores the zombie myth in a sophisticated way and uses it to connect with questions about humanity, community and family. If that’s not prize-worthy, I don’t know what is.

Or take a look at another example: The Spellbook of Listen Taylor. I think it’s one of the most intricately constructed and interesting YA books I have read. Yet it has been accused of not “really” being a YA book, in part because it’s a revision of the author’s previously-published adult novel, I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes. The focus on adult relationships survived the revision, and critics argue that teens won’t connect with the novel because of its excessive focus on the adults.

But Please Ignore Vera Dietz is as much about Vera’s father as it is about Vera, and I have no doubt teens can connect with it. And this argument doesn’t explain why another of Moriarty’s excellent novels, Feeling Sorry for Celia hasn’t been recognized, either. 

In contrast, authors like John Green, Marcus Zusak, and M.T. Anderson appear on the Printz rolls more than once.

Now, I dearly love John Green, and I do think his work represents “quality” writing, but I find it hard to believe that he wrote one of the 4 best YA novels two years in a row. I didn’t connect with M.T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing at all, but I loved Feed. The former were both honored by Printz; the latter didn’t make the cut. And Zusak’s The Book Thief is excellent, but I fail to see how it’s any more (or any less) “YA” literature than The Spellbook of Listen Taylor.

In contrast, The Hunger Games, which is easily one of the best YA books out there – “best” in the sense that it’s popular, but also in the sense that it’s extremely well-written, with a sophisticated plot, well-developed characters, and a strong voice – hasn’t been recognized. Neither has one of my favorite new(ish) novels, Ally Carter’s 2010 Heist Society, a book with a tightly constructed plot and a strong voice that simultaneously hearkens back to classic caper films and also introduces a cool new group of characters. Similarly, an author like Holly Black (whose Modern Faerie Tale series is excellent) doesn’t appear on the list even though I think her writing is lovely and her stories are well-crafted.

Before this devolves (further) into a bitch session about my pet books and how they’ve been shafted, I’m going to bring this thing full circle and wrap up.

When I look at a list of award winning books, I can’t help feeling skeptical, in large part because of the first quote above. The people who hand out awards have ideas about literary merit, sure. But they also have ideas about what it means to be “YA” literature. As the second quote makes clear, those ideas don’t necessarily resonate with actual young adults.

To be clear, I am not arguing for popularity as a benchmark for excellence. There are plenty of popular books that absolutely do not deserve to receive literary awards. Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampire series is a ton of fun, but I’m under no illusions that it’s high quality. The Pretty Little Liars books and the Vampire Diaries series are both extremely popular, but it makes sense to me that they don’t win major awards.

I guess I’m arguing that sometimes books are popular because they’re good: well-written, tightly plotted; full of compelling characters and intricately constructed language. I believe that sometimes awards committees reject the popular books out of hand because they want to “discover” work that no one else is reading or challenge readers with “edgy” or unique work. As the teen quoted in Horne’s article points out, awards have the ability to highlight the best of YA literature. Winners that conform to overly narrow definitions of “excellence” without also containing the kind of spark that attracts (teen) readers may convince young people that “real” literature is a bore.