Yay for YA: Adults should be proud to read children’s books

The Young Adult reading and writing community has been abuzz lately. The film adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in our Stars is hitting theaters tonight, which means YA has been receiving a ton of attention in the media, both good and bad. In the case for TFIOS, it’s a well-loved book for the most part, so much of the buzz leading up to now has been positive. Frankly, it has been wonderful to see the world celebrate not only John Green but YA in general. Young Adult literature is an ever-growing genre full of terrific stories and characters. For it to be embraced with so much love makes avid YA readers like me very happy and excited.

However, with the good comes the bad. The editorials come out saying how John Green saved the YA genre (he didn’t), how female writers don’t write as effectively as men (they do), and how adults should be embarrassed about reading YA novels (oh please). The first two issues are big ones, and I can go on for hours about them. But that last one is just so plain ridiculous that I feel the need to address it now.

I started reading YA as a teenager. I loved Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries, Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, every single Sarah Dessen novel, and many more. As I grew up, instead of “growing out of them,” I actually began to learn more from them. Many of these characters were experiencing their own crossroads, and I was finally getting to my own forks in the road. These characters’ choices, mistakes and journeys helped guide me in a way that no one else did.

Even now as woman in my mid-twenties, I find myself as engaged with YA and kids books as ever. Tim Federle’s middle-grade series, Better Nate than Ever, always manages to give me a much-needed confidence boost. Last year, Gayle Forman’s Just One Day forced me to reevaluate my relationships and made me realize some very important things about them. (For the record, I am more than ten years older than Nate, and seven years older than Just One Day’s Allyson.)

I must admit I don’t relate completely with younger characters, but there are still facets of these characters that ring true to me. And anyway, I don’t like to read about relatable characters all the time. Sometimes, I’m reading for an escape.  I want to escape the world of being a bored office assistant and go on an adventure with a badass warrior princess dealing with a love triangle and trying to save a kingdom. Is there anything wrong with that? It’s practically the same thing people do every Sunday night when they tune into Game of Thrones, and no one dares to tell them to be embarrassed about that.

I’m tired of the judgment I get when I tell people how much I love YA. Reading a certain article today that was against YA made me feel awful. The author of that article made me for a brief moment feel embarrassed and naive for my reading choices. God, I HATE that. I hate that I’m sensitive enough to let those ridiculously pretentious words bother me. But they did, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who felt hurt and offended by them.

You shouldn’t feel embarrassed. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed. That author has every right to feel that way about adults loving YA, and I have every right to think the author is completely and utterly wrong. I read novels written for adults too and enjoyed many of them. I get as much out of them as I do with YA. Sure, there are some moments in YA that make me roll my eyes, but there are also moments in adult novels which made me doubly roll my eyes. I mean, honestly, to think YA is not multifaceted in terms of perspectives and writing standards is pure ignorance. Not all YA has happy endings; (SPOILER ALERT) just take a look at how the Divergent trilogy ends. I can name many adult novels that have the cheesiest happy endings ever.

Read @slate YA piece. It dismisses satisfying endings and sympathetic characters as YA, then says Dickens, king of both, is ok.

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) June 5, 2014

It comes down to asking why just go against YA? Why not go after all the books from all “reading levels” that provide “uncritical” perspectives and “satisfying” endings?

If you want adults to read non-YA, shaming us is not the way to go about it. Why not explain WHY we should venture out of YA and try something involving older (and maybe wiser) characters? Entice us with something new and unknown. Don’t belittle us. All we feel now is anger and defensiveness, and the urge to stick to reading YA is even greater.

Enjoy what you love without shame. There will be people who will give you that look when you tell them you’re a Twilight fan or when you tell them the book on your bedside table is about a teenage warrior princess. Yet, remember that there will also be people who will smile and gush with you about whether the warrior princess should pick the gallant knight or the mischievous thief and how the princess should go about saving her kingdom. This is why Lucy and I created The Young Folks to give people a fair and young perspective of entertainment that isn’t conceited or disrespectful of the things we all enjoy.

When I was 16, I hardly had anyone to talk about the new Sarah Dessen book with, now I have thousands of people, and I couldn’t be happier to be part of such a lively and smart community of readers and writers. Thank you for also loving (and obsessing over) YA as I do.

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