YA and family

On the panel about YA and family, I think we had some really interesting ideas. The panelists were (if I remember correctly): Tyler Whitesides, J Scott Savage, Elana Johnson and me.

Family and the absence of family seem to be more important in MG novels. MG novels are really about family, but YA novels seem to be about moving away from the family. It's not so much that the family in a YA novel has to be missing or neglectful as in MG, in order to give the protagonist power to act on his own. In YA, family is often simply irrelevant.

We started with the above and then sort of argued about whether or not this is true. One of my thoughts was that YA novels are about creating a better family, and that this family is often a family of friends or an untraditional family unit in some way. Books that I used as examples included Rampant by Diana Peterfreund, in which a group of girls who are unicorn hunters create a family unit of all girls, and Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt, in which a young teen girl has to take her mother's place when she abandons the family, and get everyone to her grandmother's safely some distance away.

Making friends into family is, in some ways, the primary task of adolescence. You start out by loving your parents and then begin to look at them more critically, start to hate them, and then become determined to never make their mistakes, never be anything like them. At least, this is what adolescence felt like to me and I think I see my teens going through a lot of the same things. In some ways, the task of adolescence is made more difficult by sympathetic parents. Easier if you can see the flaws and reject them entirely. That way you can attach to friends and think about which of them are going to have the traits of a proper family. Also, marriage isn't part of adolescence, but thinking about marriage certainly is. Looking at others you think of as possible mates is part of it, as well.

I also think that many YA novels are about "trying out" adulthood. In Dicey's Song, Dicey becomes the adult parent and she is mostly successful at it. But by the end of the novel, she is happy to give up her adult role and trade it back to a real adult so she can be a regular teen again. Hmm, maybe say she is somewhat ambivalent about this. She's not eager to give up the role, but she sees that it is the right thing to do. There is a tension there still, because she isn't sure the real adult will do the proper job, but she knows she isn't quite ready for it, either.

Adolescence is about trying on lots of different adult roles, actually, and seeing which one fits the best. I think this narrative is completely different from the MG narrative, which is about fixing the broken family in one form or another. Look at the difference between Well Wished by Franny Billingsley (MG) and The Folk Keeper (YA). Or The Thief (MG) and The Queen of Attolia (YA).