Depravity part 2
The debate on depravity in teen lit is still raging.
Here’s an interesting article in Publisher’s Weekly that begs the question: where are all the non-violent teen books?
One big question: is YA saving — or damaging — teen lives? In a piece for New York magazine, Margaret Lyons wrote that Cox Gurdon is wrong when she said it’s “indeed likely” that today’s books subtly encourage and popularize self-harm. And tweeters on #YAsaves note that “dark” teen books that bring up homosexuality, cutting, suicide, and rape, among other tough topics, prevent rather than promote dangerous behavior.
Along those lines, David Levithan, editorial director at Scholastic and author of several YA novels himself, refers to Patricia McCormick’s Cut, now celebrating its 10th anniversary. “It’s about being a cutter but getting help and finding your way out of a bad place,” he said. “It sounds so clichéd to say, but we have had so many emails from kids and the adults in their life saying this book saved the kid from doing the thing portrayed in the book.”
Amy Alessio, a teen librarian in Schaumburg, Ill., still recommends quality books with dark content, such as the Hunger Games trilogy, to adolescents. “I don’t think it inspires teens to be more violent.” She herself loves reading mysteries but notes that they don’t inspire her to go out and solve crimes in real life.
I’m pleased to see that this topic is getting so much airtime in the international press but it concerns me that censorship stills seems to be seen as a possibility in dealing with violence in teen lit. At their heart, YA novels tackle issues that effect the daily lives of their readers. If you censor out any or all violent content, then you’re taking away yet another resource that could in fact help teens resolve the problems in their lives. YA should be a mirror of life, not a utopian ideal of what we want our kids to be. (Although that would make for an awesome story!)
Let’s hear some more voices on the side of non-censorship.
Read the original article here.