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"Darkness Visible" Article in WSJ attacking modern YA
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Mod
As a matter of interest, I saw on the shelves all these dark and disturbing YA covers in the children's section (where YA seems to live these days) but Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was nowhere in sight, neither was Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle. Anne McCaffrey's Pern books were all in the adult fantasy section. I have no idea how they figure that out. Those books could be read by tweens and teens alike but they are relegated to a totally different section in the book store. Similarly, in a second hand bookstore I frequent, YA is with the children's section. It boggles the mind.
Most of the readers of YA that I know are all in their late 20s, or 30s. Certainly not the impressionable tweens and teens the market seems to want to target with heros and heriones aged 15 or 16.
That said however, teens of today deal with a completely different world that I had to deal with. I never knew about gays growing up, AIDS was something that I only learned of once I had finished high school in 1987. My first encounter with a teen that was depressed was a boy who was a good friend who hung himself when I was 12 and he was 13. My next encounter, besides my mother with her mental health issues, was 8 years later, when I was out of school and working. A work aquaintance told everyone who would listen of her depression. Before that, I had a pretty naive world view, as did many of my childhood friends.
Today, nothing seems to be hidden from children. They are exposed to so much more than we ever were exposed to and it is frightening not only for them but us as parents. On the one hand I want to keep my two kids wrapped in cottonwool but on the other I know that I cannot realistically even attempt raising them that way. The only thing I can limit is their exposure to certain issues and how we talk about it.
I think we are back to the 'lowest common denominator' of one-upmanship. 'So&So's book sold scads - and she had a cutter in it, so I'm going to have my cutter raped by ____ relation. That should sell more books.'
I suspect that agents and publishers look at the numbers and figure out 'more gore = more money.'
The healthier stories aren't as sensational.
When I was a kid, I read horse stories - right up until the horses were more abused with each book.
I'd like to write a horse story where the horse abuses the kid - more realistic than 'Black Stallion Syndrom' books where the horse acts more like Lassie than a real horse.
The thing I find odd is that the original article (not the response article) has a woman who can't find anything acceptable. Last time I thumbed through the YA section at my local Target, the average book certainly wasn't all extreme narratives. Similar deal and Barnes and Noble (this was within the last two months).I'm somewhat split. That is to say, I feel that the original article is implying a much wider trend then actually exists.
Not that there aren't dark themes and dark trends, but if we're going to say something like, "Well most kids aren't cutting or getting severe homophobic beatings" then it's important to acknowledge that the vast majority of YA books aren't about those extreme issues.
The question comes down to how much is too much? How dark is too dark?
The original article certainly muddles the issue itself by mentioning things other than the most extreme things it hits upon in the second article and also by changing age and content emphasis in different parts of the discussion.
Also, the difference between a 12-year-old and, say, a 18-year-old is pretty darn wide (or ever a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old).
On some level, though, I do agree with somewhat about the normalization of certain things, and think we certainly don't want to saturate the YA material with extreme things, but at the same time, yes, there are cutters and kids who've been beaten for being gay. I'm not a teacher and don't routinely deal with hundreds of kids (well, I do routinely deal with 17-20 year olds), and I've known such kids. Heck, my wife, when she was in high school was sent to a counseling group because she was depressed. Three-fourths of the people in the group were cutters (she wasn't). So in so far as the availability of some materials, there probably should be some.
I just don't feel that YA stuff, in most cases, is not actually focused, overall, on extreme issues.
Amusingly,I've ridden buses for years with teens and deal with older teens routinely, so I know how much they curse, but in my own YA work, I'm so fuddy-duddy and parental that I actually developed a plot reason to strip out pretty much all obscenity from my book. :p
I'm with you, J.A. I've written four YA books, three of them through major publishers. I felt a responsibility to the intended audience. When the editor of one book wanted me to turn a mentor-type relationship between a school girl and her teacher into a romance, I drew the line I wouldn't cross. The editor backed off.Most of my books were written at a time when dark issues were arising in YA fiction. While I could see a benefit from some such books for a certain segment of the target audience, I wanted to provide escape from, rather than immersion in, the problems associated with growing up.
Mod
But I don't understand how the good, entertaining books, Anne McCaffrey for instance, since Claudine has already identified her and I devoured her books with glee, was taken away from the teens and turned into adult women's fiction. Nor do I see that, even if it is necessary to give YA fiction to a whole class of semi-literate or immature new reader, the same literature cannot multitask as core reading for several teenage groups (advanced youngsters, the standard teenage group, and those in transition to more grown-up literature). What has happened to the family bookshelf?
The other day I found on a group I read a statement from the writer of one of these routine little books of "How I was abused as a child" that have more therapeutic value for the writer than any literary or even psychological interest. The writer said bluntly, "Buy my book. It is your duty to buy my book."
In young adult lit we seem to have moved from a resigned, "It is impossible to shield children from this nastiness," through "We're only presenting life as it is, warts and all," to "It is our duty to force these unpleasant truths on our children." Even if we abstract from the mercenary motive that gore sells, this line of argument is still crap, as I demonstrated in the previous paragraph. It is the same "social responsibility" argument that fifty years ago created a dull literature of dull lives dully described in their dullest minute. The only difference is that now we have loving descriptions of self-mutilation.
I suspect that writers of that stuff thrill vicariously; it would be interesting to discover under hypnosis how many of them really wanted to cut themselves, even if only to be fashionable, but didn't have the guts.
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All of this is complicated by a modern tendency to write children's literature to be outside the experience of children, even to skip young adults altogether, and to go for the adults. I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy with great enjoyment and admiration, but with mounting bafflement that the author, his editors and publishers, and reviewers, all agreed this was children's literature. What sort of a little monster would understand (or want to understand) more than five per cent of the metaphysical questions Pullman addressed?
This is of course an extreme example, in that Pullman's natural constituency seems to be the well-educated. But I wonder if some of the books the WSJ writer objects to aren't intended for an adult group accustomed to teenage protagonists and violence, escalating for commercial reasons.
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ROBUST was eventually formed essentially because I and others of the original members had a whole row of unpleasant experiences with a bunch of women who set themselves up as arbiters on the Amazon fora. It had every appearance of a persecution, a witch hunt. What was clear to me was that these women were poorly educated, and that their reading was worthless pulp. The writers they persecuted were the better writers on the board. Their remarks when collated and given to a tutorial of my motivational psych postgrads (1) were instantly and unanimously identified as inspired by malicious envy and feelings of inferiority. When I said that in a timespan of well under a decade the original classification of romance had been taken over by pornography (and the perfectly clear word erotica perverted beyond all recognition to mean pornography too), the brightest of my students said instantly, "Violence won't be far behind." You put that together with a habit if reading YA books (and not Pullman either!) by a certain class of adults, and the WSJ article should probably not surprise us.
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Much as we may abhor the bullying unpleasantness off the hoi polloi on the Amazon fora, there is a more positive way of viewing their reading. It seems likely that they may have suffered culturally deprived childhoods, no books, poor schooling. (We were looking at one case study that claims over 80% of American households have no books/periodicals beyond a TV schedule.) They show all the signs of being over-aware of it, as my students noted instantly. They are rectifying the perceived shortfall by reading what they understand. Given time, their understanding may broaden. Whatever they read may thus be seen as a hopeful sign. After all, many of us, including me, don't really care what children read, as long as they read, because the habit of reading is what matters later in life, not necessarily the content of early reading. (Of course I don't mean self-mutilation and rape; I mean give the little darlings comics if that's what they want rather than Astrid Lindgren.) Why shouldn't the same apply to people who come to reading as adults?
Whether this line of argument excuses what has happened to a part of YA literature is a different question.
(1) Dogpoop, the one who thought one's culture is measured by the number of Cliff Notes you can afford, will probably feel she's come up in the world to be a lab rat in an ancient college.
I wanted to provide escape from, rather than immersion in, the problems associated with growing up.
Well, my YA work isn't total escape from teen problems in that sense.
It's a paranormal and not super-dark (especially compared to the stuff being discussed in the article), but it does include a major bullying element, social shunning, and other assorted high school stuff.
I briefly touch on racism, but it's more from a "people being stupid and ignorant" angle rather than any sort of hate angle. It's certainly way more mild in that sense then say the stuff I dealt with growing up.
Really, it's more a story about a girl coming to terms with her own emotions over her parents' death in an accident overlaid over your more standard "stop the bad guys"-style urban fantasy stuff.
So, half-escapist/half-not.
I guess I shouldn't have said my books provided escape from problems. They were certainly there, but more outside the young main character rather than a part of the young person's own psychology.My books:
Echoes in the Grove deals with the underground railroad in Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the death of a parent to the cholera epidemic that hit Ohio in 1854.
One-Way Romance is a lighthearted treatment of first love.
A Boy I Never Knew, based on a real-life murder case in Ohio, focuses on finding the killer of a teenager.
The Absence of Color is a time-travel story about a bi-racial girl who travels from the present day back to the age of the Great Gatsby where she finds both love and bigotry.
were instantly and unanimously identified as inspired by malicious envy and feelings of inferiority.Yeah, I caught that, too. The amount of hate baffled me, but envy is the only explaination. The cultural norm is to pull others down so they CAN'T succeed - therefore the status quoe is kept. (Lowest Common Denominator)
Indie = freedom to write what you want.
Screw the witch hunters.
I had the same reaction to Pullman's work (read it as an adult). I liked it, but even as a pretty smart kid somewhat interested in theology as a child, I don't really think I would have appreciated most of the thematic exploration.One thing I'm curious about is if the most extreme/issues-oriented material actually sells all that well.
Though I don't pay as much attention in recent months, I used to spend a considerable amount of time following the opinions and statements of agents and editors.
One thing that struck me is their fairly constant whine about how the "right" kind of YA books weren't as popular. Mostly this translated into them complaining a relative lack of popularity for more "realistic" issues-oriented contemporary YA.
Several of the books that they heaped praise on were all kind of the edgier YA issues books. I remember following one agent over a several year period where she continued to be annoyed at the kind of books that people were actually buying.
Of course, the literary types are going to gobble up any deeply self-focused dark psychological stuff, so those kinds of books will get praised for their "realism" and "importance", but that doesn't necessarily mean they sell all that well.
I honestly don't know.
Whenever I've interacted with teen readers, the average one didn't seem to be screaming for more contemporary issues-oriented YA, let alone super-edgy/dark stuff. That's purely anecdotal though, I don't know the sales numbers.
I suspect, though, if Amanda Hocking had written a bunch of YA contemporary books about cutters, rape, and savage Matthew Shepard-style beatings instead of PNR-type books*, she'd still be working for 18k a year as an elder care assistant instead of signing million dollar contracts.
*I haven't read a huge amount of Hocking, but what I did read wasn't all that dark. It was mostly fantasy escapist stuff.
Mod
Are you now denying that you were a little monster, Jeremy?
Mod
I've read a bit of Hocking's first book. I had to put it down and walk away. It irritated me beyond belief as I found it juvenile and sorely lacking as far as the plot was concerned. But that may be because I am reading through 42 year old eyes.
The community my two are growing up in is still very naive. The children mostly are church going god fearing kids with definate anti gay and anti other skin colours tendencies which means that most of what we talk about in our home goes against whatever their friends are taught in their homes. As a result, and because from a shopowner's pov, it makes sense to keep in stock books that sell, they just don't make an effort to keep books that I would buy most often.
I am on the lookout for a good second hand copy of the Harry Potter books for him as I think he will enjoy reading them.
Andre, it fascinates me the number of people who walk into my small study and comment on the amount of books all over the place (I have about 100 books on the temporary shelving with about 4 or 5 boxes still to unpack in a storage unit). People seem to read adverts instead of novels. Maybe it has to do with the limited attention span of people these days and the lack of instant gratification that comes from having to wade through 500 pages before finding out what happens in the end. People just don't read anymore.
Mod
By the way, asking for directions to this village in a nearby village, I ran into the the classic Irish direction: "To get there, it is better not to start from here."
Duh?
Mod
I started reading before I started school. My grandmother would spend hours teaching me how to read, which is probably why I am never without a book in my bag or my kindle in my hand. I devour books. My son on the other hand could spend hours playing wii games (he lives to play Indiana Jones Lego and the Star Wars lego games) yet put a book in front of him and he is instantly bored. My daughter likes to read. She's just started The Secret Garden which she is struggling through as it is an English version. We go through what she has read and talk about whatever she doesn't understand. I admire her tenacity.
A few of their friends read but only the class reading list, nothing more.
I write YA and I work in a school library. I sit in the library on the secondary campus sometimes and hear language that would make a sailor blush coming from the corridor outside. We have kids with problems, we have all the usual bullying and fights and rebellion. But when kids come to the library to request books, they're not looking for issues, they're looking for a good story. Being a Catholic school, our books have to meet certain 'standards', but I've never had a kid complain that there are no books with swearing or underage sex, suicide or rape. Admittedly, we're a junior high school, so we don't have kids older than 15 and my son did move on to more issue-ridden books when he moved on to senior school, but they were 'classics' like 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Wake in Fright'.This idea that kids need 'issues' and angst is probably why my children's books was labelled 'fluffy bunny' by a recent reviewer. Yet my YA novel, which is fairly fluffy bunny too, was reviewed by a fifteen-year-old who loved it. I'm going to keep writing what I do.
Mod
You know, someone once worked out that my education cost about three quarters of a million dollars, not counting sending me to night school in the company jet. But I know where I got the most valuable part of my education: it was from the women in my family who taught me to read the comics in half a dozen European languages by the time I was three, and from the black women who would sit with me and teach me their difficult native languages, giving me confidence in all languages, so that as an adult you could drop me some place where I didn't speak a word of the language and a week later I could get a job as radio jock in the local lingo.
I must tell you though that I am not overly worried about a fascination with computers. The most effective part of my own number one's education was the Mac we gave him for his twelfth birthday -- when it cost the price of a small car and it really hurt -- which later won him a place at Apple and from there the certainty of a decent job anywhere he wants to go. Private schooling did give him a decent facility with maths, it must be admitted, but otherwise I wasn't impressed with the quality of the education at what is supposed to be the best school in the country; too much emphasis on sports and not enough on academic and cultural excellence.
Mod
Katie, if the reviewers preach from your pulpit, honour them. If they want to write your books for you, ignore them. Don't give them the slightest edge. That was lies disaster, because they won't like what you write when you write to please them either, and you will have undermined your own confidence by succumbing to pressure. Their business is finding fault. Stick to your guns. You've found an audience because you have guns to stick to.
Mod
Andre, my once upon a time very English family is very Afrikaans now. She struggles with the language more than the concepts but I am hopeful that with more and more difficult tasks, her grasp of English will improve. She already speaks English with a decidedly Afrikaans slant.
What I mean by that is that English speaking people talk from the leaves to the branches to the trunk and then the root of a tree while Afrikaners do it the other way round. More often than not something is horribly lost in the translation!
I am not overly worried either with the access to technology. The more the merrier I say. He will come over to the Dark Side that is reading in his own time. All I can do is generate his interest in books he likes reading. Like Captain Underpants. http://www.goodreads.com/search?q=cap...
Mod
I am on the lookout for a good second hand copy of the Harry Potter books for him as I think he will enjoy reading them. You might look for some Percy Jackson as well. It's no HP, but it's definitely something a lot of MG boys really like.
I'd go with the Andre Norton sci-fi, then he might get into the fantasy stuff.I found her book 'Daybreak 2450 AD' utterly enthralling. Her stories are captivating, without gore or sex, just exactly what I needed for escapism.
I agree with Gurdon's piece in the WSJ. That precise topic has been bothering me for years, and it's one of several reasons why I write my books. I realize that the world is not some sun-drenched Alpine village, inhabited by Polyannas and Maria von Trapp. However, I do believe that there is a lot of worth in celebrating that which is good, and that children, tender-hearted (as Gurdon aptly notes), derive solace and are ennobled by such literature. Stooping down to the darkness certainly does normalize it. I'm mangling the original quote, but there's great value in striving toward the better angels of our nature. Children and teens are very much affected by what they take in. A book or a film is tantamount to a friend, in my view. You can quickly know someone by taking a look at their friends.
I'm starting to ramble here, but Gurdon's essay really worked me up. I don't know if any of you read the Sherman Alexie op-ed she referenced. Alexie holds the polar opposite view: cutting, rape, etc., are therapeutic in YA literature due to allowing readers to see that their own experiences are common, nothing to be bothered with, greying into amorality, etc.
Call me Georg, but I'd much rather watch Maria von Trapp singing "the hills are alive..." than watch The Hills Have Eyes.
Mod
BTW, Hills Have Eyes is such bad cinema drivel it makes you wish you had a blunt spoon so that you could gouge your eyes out and then take a metal sponge to the inside of your brain so that you could remove the taint of the crap that Hollywood calls decent cinema these days. Give me Hitchcock any day over these new horror films.
Mod
Hear, hear.
Claudine has a point. Your kids become what they take in,not only junk food but junk culture.
We threw out the television when our child was born, and didn't bring it back until he was in high school. That was half the battle won, right there, in a single decision and act.
Mod
I am still with Gurdon, but I investigated "cutting" specifically and learned that it is much more widespread than I was aware of. Kids in my own high school have been cutting themselves and I have been totally unaware of it. So I decided to write about "cutting" in a short story. My School of the Ages apprentice magicians will not cut themselves, but perhaps they can befriend and help someone who does. Sherman Alexie's YA book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is absolutely fucking brilliant and I am disappointed to see him take a stance so different from my own view.
I do have friends that I see in person, but many of my friends live in my computer, too, like you guys. It is an honor to belong to this intellectual community. Thanks!
Claudine, the Sherman Alexie op-ed she referenced is: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/0...Your post about finding books for your son put my mind whirling. There are a ton of great books for the pre-teen years! Wait, is he pre-teen? At any rate, I love recommending books for that age group. Has he ever read any of Sid Fleischman's books? By the Great Horn Spoon, The Ghost in the Noonday Sun...
Or John Christopher's Tripod series? Prydain Chronicles...aargh. I need to stop now or I'll continue until the cows come home.
Mod
Hmm... 11 and English as his second language? Okay.I'd recommend: Sid Fleischman (Ghost in the Noonday Sun, By the Great Horn Spoon, Djingo Django), Brian Jacques (Redwall series), Lloyd Alexander (The Cat Who Wished to be a Man, Prydain Chronicles [The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, The High King]), Eleanor Cameron (The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Mr. Bass's Planetoid), Andre Norton (try her Magic series for children: Steel Magic, Dragon Magic, etc - very fun), Robert O'Brien (Mrs. Fribsy and the Rats of NIMH), Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy), Robert McCloskey (Homer Price, Centerburg Tales), Robert Lawson (Ben and Me, Rabbit Hill, Smeller Martin - wonderful stories!), Walter Brooks (try his Freddy series about a talking pig named, well, Freddy), George Selden (The Cricket in Times Square, Tucker's Countryside), John Gordon (The Giant Under the Snow - a fabulous story - a genuine urban fantasy ages before the genre existed).
Okay. I'll stop now.
Mod
I read the article. He makes very valid points too. Kids with his background are far more adult in their outlooks and his novel obviously resonates with those readers and adults. Kids without traumatised lives cannot fully relate and that is where the problem lies I think. Parents who wish to keep their children innocent will not want their kids to read something with graphic and violent content. For me though, that type of novel has it's place in YA literature too.
We didn't even attempt guidance. We just made sure there were lots of books that we would like to read too. Boxes of books would arrive from every publisher where Andre has a friend. Once a month we'd take Giselle to the bookstores for a whole day's outing and let her buy whatever she wanted. Once a year Ferry would make her sort out the books she didn't intend reading or had outgrown, for giving to the library. Then there was always tears as we set so many shelf feet to be cleared before she could have new books. Cruel, but it worked. Books assumed a certain distinction in her mind, and she could always get old books back on loan because we gave them to her school library. We weren't so liberal with trash toys or disposable clothes. It was interesting to see how her taste was almost fully formed when she was given her own budget and card for casual clothes at 13. Now when I want to be trendy over weekends, I wear her castoffs... I swear, it saves so much time wasted standing in stores and wondering if some garment will suit. I'm a tres fashionable mum on the cheap! Ferry says it's disgusting how men fifteen and twenty years my junior eye me. Ha! All the same, despite this fortunate success with little or no control, I'm not so sure I would have permitted books about cutting, or rape, or such matters. What happened to innocence and childhood? Maybe I'm going to sound terrifically untrendy, but I don't see why such material, no matter how true to a minority of children, should be forced down the throats of happy children for some silly political agenda. It's nonsense.
Mod
I proudly sit on the fence now after reading the article Christopher referenced. While I do think children should read age appropriate books, I don't think hiding the darker things in life is a good idea. Sometimes, a little bit of darkness gives them insight into another person's life. Books with a dark theme have their place certainly but I still won't go out and buy them for my two until they are both much older and understand the underlying themes. Then again, with the exposure to violent crime and violence they have had, they do understand darker themes much better than I sometimes give them credit for.
Thanks for the thread, Matt. For the most part I've been in hibernation for a few weeks and just read every post. I could fill this comment with quotes that resonated with me, but the posts have all been so thoughtful I will only say that Christopher's at message 26 is one that stood out, and Andre's entertaining as always. If you are looking for something for your children, YA or otherwise, read the multi-talented Katie. Her stories are (well) written to inspire.
Dakota, I want you as a parent in my next life...
I think my 2 cents worth is going to be: "All things in moderation."I was a kid when "Go Ask Alice" and "Syble" came out. It doesn't get much darker than that - unless you are going to read 'Carrie' or 'Cujo' both of which came out a few years later.
Claudine wrote: "I've yet to read Pullman's work. I will eventually get to it. I know that my son at 11 is way too young to read it even though he and I often have very intelligent (on his part) conversations abo..."Claudine,
Do I have the age of your son at ten? If so I may be able to offer some suggestions if you like
Claudine wrote: "LOL! I actually know someone who doesn't read. Not even the newspaper. Oh sure he reads everyday work related reports and stuff but refuses to open a book, let alone a magazine. He doesn't even..."Claudine:
If you daughter is liking The Secret Garden she will probably love The Humming Room. I had to buy multiple copies.
J.A. wrote: "I am on the lookout for a good second hand copy of the Harry Potter books for him as I think he will enjoy reading them. You might look for some Percy Jackson as well. It's no HP, but it's defini..."
Agree with JA on the Rick Riordan suggestion. His books fly off my shelves. Also I can not keep graphic novels on the shelves either; The Lunch Lady series, Sidekicks...
Mod
Try books by Ben Mikaelson. Petey is one.Black Stallion books by Walter Farley.
Farley is very good. However, if your children catch 'Black Stallion Syndrom' you are up for an expensive hobby.I never got over mine and have a big black horse in my pasture to prove it.
Kench! Kat, my dd1 caught the bug at 3 after her dad bought her a pony - and then we moved and had to sell him (the pony alas, not the dad) and never did seem to be in the right place at the right time to get her another. She has never forgiven us, lol, and to this day it is her fondest dream to own a horse - except for her that would mean she'd have to be extraordinarily wealthy because we all know she would not put in the time necessary to care for such a beast.
They're expensive, though not as expensive as smoking or partying. :-) My one indulgence (or 3 indulgences, depending on how you look at it.)I had my first pony at 4 - sold my horse at 16 and got the old mare when I was 30. I had to finish a college course in IT to afford her. She's like my kid and my BFF all rolled into one.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...
A Wall Street Journal reviewer describes some rather painful trends in YA literary, multiple books employing huge amounts of violence, profanity, homophobia, rape, incest, and self-mutilation. She was violently critiqued and accused of advocating censorship. I don't think she did, though. Here is a blurb from a book she was sent for review.
"I used to squirm when I heard people talking about cutting—taking a razor to your own flesh never seemed logical to me. But in reality, it's wonderful. You can cut into yourself all the frustrations people take out on you."
And a quote from the original article, another passage. "She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn't breathe."
Here's the follow-up article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...
I'm entirely on Gurdon's side in this one. This is horrendous stuff. As a YA writer I am really nobody, but at least my stuff is written to inspire young people to be stronger. Most kids don't cut themselves. I see hundreds of kids every day as a teacher and they aren't cutting themselves, or being raped by their parents, or being victims of homophobic beatings, or seeing mutilated body parts. The focus of YA literature on this stuff is ridiculous.
Please read and discuss.