Warning: Adults who read Young Adult books should be embarrassed

Should adults be reading Young Adult books?

 

Author Maggie Stiefvater wrote a brilliant response on her blog this week to the continued attack on the Young Adult genre. This time, it's Ruth Graham ranting that YA fiction 'is for weepy teenagers. Let's stop pretending that it's respectable literature for grown-ups'.

After reading Ms Graham's article and being incensed by her comments such as 'Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children' and 'if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something', I raised my hands, ready to churn out a furious response, when another article caught my eye.

Mark Medley's article sums up a lot of what I wanted to say. He says that after reading Ms Graham's article, he learnt that he should be ashamed of himself and began emptying his bookshelves of all his YA books: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. 'I tossed my well-read copies of To Kill A Mockingbird, The Little Prince, The Catcher in the Rye, and my Oxford edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, because, you know, Romeo and Juliet. They were, after all, teenagers, and one can never be too careful.'

And my best part: 'Looking at all the gaps on my shelf, it struck me that while Graham is right, she doesn’t go far enough. Forget about adults reading books meant for kids; how about the problem of kids reading books meant for adults?  No one should be allowed to read outside his or her demographic. Perhaps books could be slapped with a rating system, like at the movies...Graham, of course, would probably be aghast at such a suggestion. It is nonsense – just like the idea of telling someone else what they should not be allowed to read.'

Bazinga!

My two cents: It seems to me that it was when books for teenagers got their own genre - Young Adult - that all the trouble started. Suddenly books that previously crossed over from teen to adult and back again found themselves being labeled. Don't get me wrong; I love that YA finally has its own place in the book world. But it has meant that it is vulnerable to attack. I'm not worried, though. The YA genre is more than capable of standing up for itself.

Bring it on, the Ruth Grahams of the world. Bring. It. On.