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January 17, 2009

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helping break down the art show

That Susan... We just can't take her anywhere without her making trouble.

Seriously... Strictly speaking, I am impressed by your description of the book, and by its publishers releasing it. It seems less like a Young Adult novel and more like a story about young adults.

That's a hard distinction to make, isn't it? Fiction for young adults vs. a story about young adults or about matters of particular interest to young adults. It's sort of like discussions I had with Raven before Arisia over "teen panels" vs. "panels about things that interest teens."

Vintage is written at an fairly high level, but it's a fast read and the page count is a little misleading; there's not as much text per page as a typical adult novel. Would I have liked it as much if it had just been about teenaged romantic/sexual angst, gay or otherwise? Probably not; the ghost aspect is what really grabbed me. It is not, thankfully, some gauzy, heart-tugging paranormal romance story with an improbable ending where everyone lives happily ever after. But it's also a bit more linear and simplistic (problem -> solution; problem -> solution) than a typical adult novel.

For something I picked up completely by chance, I'm rather pleased.

Would you then say that the book is something between Young Adult and Adult?

As for my original comment... On some other blog I recently made some comments about TCM showing an early 1970s movie musical version of Huckleberry Finn. I remembered an article about it in Reader's Digest when it came out, and how they were decrying the lack of wholesome family movies. When I saw it, not long ago, I found myself thinking that this toothless whitewashed movie would have Mark Twain spinning in his grave. Frankly, anybody who think that Huck is a kid's story because the main character is a kid missed all the parts about slavery, and the nastiness of people.

Serge:
No, I'd say it's a YA novel that's perfectly find for non-young adults.

I'm a little startled by your implication that a kid's story can't have slavery or any nastiness in it. Huckleberry Finn isn't written at the young child's level, and I don't think older children need or ought to be sheltered from such things.

I'm glad your reward for helping us out turned out to be such a pleasant one. I may need to go looking for that book, based on your comments.

Lara

Susan... I don't think older children need or ought to be sheltered from such things

I agree, but the people who made that movie obviously thought so. It was painful to see Paul Winfield playing Jim with such a sunny disposition - at least in the parts I could stand.

Based on what you know of the YA field, would you say that they usually shy away from darkness? If they do, it might be because publishers don't want to anger parents, who tend to forget what they were exposed to as children.

I don't think I know much about YA literature, so I have no opinion. I don't read enough of it, despite what it's looked like a on Rixo lately.

Thank you for the kind words about the book. :)

Autogoogling? :)

Still, Susan, you probably know more about the YA field than I do in spite of my reading the Locus reviews. There may be more darkness in the YA literature than I think since my impression is based on what kid movies are like. That is a trap I should not fall into, I know, considering how many people's opinion of adult SF is based on movies and TV. On the other hand, there have been movies like The Last Mimzy, which, while it had nearly nothing in common with the Lewis Padgett story, dealt with darkness: heck, it's about two kids from Today who know that their actions and decisions matter and will affect whether or not Tomorrow's humankind will avert extinction.

Modern YA literature often has quite a lot of darkness. I believe that there's always some kind of hope or redemption at the end, but I could be mistaken about that.

I don't really read YA literature, but when I was a kid, I had a book called Stonewords or Ghostwords, that was dark and sad and written at a grade school level. I read it three or four times before it got lost somewhere in the transition from kid to teen. Meanwhile, the much happier books that I read in that period of my life got read and set aside without another thought (and they now all blur in my mind until it's just one big blog of horses, teen and pre-teen girls, and winning races against impossible odds).

So I think there is a market for kid and YA novels that have a dark and/or bittersweet tone. I doubt very much that teens and adults just suddenly become Goth or Emo overnight -- they have to start being drawn to darker, sadder things earlier in life.

AJ... Maybe the kids who become Goth used to go straight from YA to adult, or straight from no-reading to adult.

Regarding Susan's comment about happy endings... This always makes me think of old-time film director Frank Capra. People make fun of his happy endings, but his main characters go thru Hell before they get to the happy end. The most famous example would be It's a Wonderful Life, which begins with George Bailey contemplating financial ruin and suicide on Christmas Eve, and we discover that his whole life was a succession of his giving up on his own happiness for others, and he literally stops existing, before he finds that he mattered a lot to everybody else.

Is Steinbeck's The Red Pony today considered a YA? I've never read the book, but I have seen the movie (with a score by no less than Aaron Copland), which of course may diverge considerably from the original. It is about growing up, with quite a bit of darkness in it.

I am reminded of a Locus interview with Terri Windling a few years back. If I remember correctly, she said she didn't enjoy horribly dark stories because she was quite intimately acquainted with darknes when she was growing up.

I expect it's my (very limited) choice of children's/young adults novels I've read recently, but they all seem fairly dark. Pullman's Dark Materials and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events which admittedly I've only read 12 of the 13 books of, spring to mind.

Even Harry Potter was darker than my memory says kids books were, but then again I was reading Dragonlance and David Eddings at the age of 10 and never really looked back from adult books after that.

Yeah I really liked it. IMO it is hard to do Goth in a way that feels both sympathetic to a non-goth grownup and realistic, and Vintage succeeds. Also at taking teenage love seriously without making it into forever and ever.

Serge:
Never read it, so no idea.

Neil:
I'm trying to think what children's/YA stuff I read, and I do recall some dark moments even in things like Marguerite Henry's books and other horsey stuff, even if they went on to happy endings.

Mer:
You know what's funny to me? The stuff in the book that apparently is supposed to be Goth only reads as such to me because it is so labeled. I thought wearing black and hanging out in cemeteries and enduring angst and playing with Ouija boards such were perfectly normal things to do in high school, and I was never Goth. (I'm not sure Goth existed as a subculture at that time; if it did, I wasn't aware of it.)

In nonfiction, I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a child, which obviously wasn't exactly lighthearted. I went on from that to spend a weekend reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, most of which did not stay with me.

When I was seven or eight I read all but one of the Newberry medal winners to that point for a school contest, but I can't say I remember what most of them were. (Yes, I won the contest. Most people read three or four; I read something like sixty.) I know that introduced me to Lloyd Alexander and Madeline L'Engle.

Susan... I thought wearing black and hanging out in cemeteries and enduring angst and playing with Ouija boards such were perfectly normal things to do in high school, and I was never Goth.

That'd make you a proto-Goth. On the other hand, I think Goth started when you were in your teens. 1986's Beetlejuice featured a young Winona Ryder in what I consider Goth although it might not have yet coalesced into what eventually became Goth. And Gaiman's Sandman was being published at the time.

I was never attracted to excessive eye makeup or to what is considered Goth music. And by 1986 I was heading off to university and working RenFaires and attending cons and had plenty to occupy myself with. Nor have I ever read Sandman.

All this being said, I have to drop by the bookstore today to get a card for my wife since it's our wedding anniversary. I should look for Berman's book at the local Barnes & Noble. They have a very good YA section.

Since, as Mer observed to me on the phone last night, he won't actually get any royalties if people keep receiving his book as a freebie, that's a good idea. (Or if you order it through my nifty shopping link, I actually earn a few pennies to support Rixo as well. If enough pennies accumulate, Amazon will even send me the money instead of just a smug statement that I have so few pennies that they're not worth writing a check.)

I have ordered it thu your nifty shopping link.

I guess one could call Pyle's Robin Hood and Stevenson's Treasure Island, once knpwn as Boy's Adventures, were their day's equivalent of today's YA, with the former having its central character be a young boy, and the former's cast all being adults but aimed at kids. But modern publishing, for ease of marketing, has created genres out of its ancestors that have stricter requirements.

Well, and technically, he may never get royalties. He has to earn back his advance before he gets royalties and many authors never actually get royalties.

As to dark YA stories, the WashPost has an article on it today. (There's a couple of side-stories linked in the box under the first para.)

Ah, and while I was on the WashPost, I noticed that Gaiman's The Graveyard Book has won this year's Newbery Medal.

Marilee: I learned that by Twitter-stalking him :D

(but Chris showed me the article, too. Still have to go pick up the book, since I didn't get it for Christmas/New Year/Channukah)

AJ, I got my copy from the library. I was in the hold queueueue for a couple weeks!

Good news for Gaiman followed by still more bad publishing industry news: Realms of Fantasy is closing after the April issue, per SFScope. Apparently the decision and announcement were so badly handled that the news spread before they managed to read editor Shawna McCarthy. Tacky.

Having just last week renewed my subscription for a year, I am miffed on several levels.

Marilee... Regarding Gaiman, I'm very much enjoying P.Craig Russell's comic-book adaptation of The Dream Hunters.

According to Twitter, The Graveyard Book is already in works in a movie.

Realms of Fantasy is going away? That's a bummer. I was looking forward to someday collecting a rejection letter from them.

What? No more Realms? They're my favorite magazine. Damndamndamn!

Well, that was quick.

I received Berman's book today.

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