What can I say, YA books? You got me through grade school. Sometimes, I still venture back to Hogwarts, or District 12, or Narnia, if I need an extra dose of courage.
Yes, there are many wonderful books for old adults out there, but there’s just something so satisfying about a good coming-of-age story. And you’re never too old to be devastated by the death of Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web (spoiler alert).
Haters are going to hate, and say that Young Adult fiction is less “literary” than “real literature,” but I just feel sorry for them. If you need to tear down Ramona Quimby or The Babysitter’s Club to feel good about yourself, you must be living a bleak existence.
You’ve taught me so much.
To Kill a Mockingbird taught me the meaning of justice. Twilight taught me not to date stalkers. A Series of Unfortunate Events taught me that adults aren’t automatically right. And most recently, The Fault in Our Stars taught me that cancer is terrible and life is sad.
And I didn’t even know I was learning anything, most of the time. I thought I was just reading some rad book about some kid named Huckleberry hanging out with his adult friend on a river and wham—lesson about historical injustice.
You were pretty advanced, too.
Ok, so maybe The Magic Treehouse didn’t have too much in the way of heavy material (or did it? I only really remember the Vikings one), but there are a lot of YA books that go hard.
I mean, Speak? The Giver? The Golden Compass? That shit gets deep. The best young adult books didn’t treat us like kids, they treated up like thinking, feeling people. And those books did not hold back. I mean, Voldemort tries to commit genocide. Count Olaf puts a baby in a cage and wants to marry a 14-year-old girl. There’s that one blowjob scene in Looking for Alaska, I think.
You still hold up.
Not every book is going to have the same magic as when you were a kid—Curious George has lost some of his bite, and even From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is starting to feel a little unrealistic (I mean… I feel like the Met Museum has security cameras?)
But still, most of the YA classics only get deeper with age. Every time you read that book, you remember who you were that first time you read it. And the first time you read it was probably under the covers, with a flashlight, long after your parents thought you were asleep. And if that book was Coraline or Goosebumps, you probably never slept again.
I love you, YA books.
We don’t need to talk about how many times I’ve read all of Harry Potter.
