The Importance of Young Adult Literature

Julianna Concepcion | Opinions

Opened book close up with bookshelf in the back / Photo by 'Prostock-studio', licensed by Envato.com

Last semester, I took a Young Adult Literature course with Dr. Speicher, a professor in my major. Before this course, I had read a bit of young adult literature as a kid, stuff like Pretties and The Giver. But what had mostly stuck with me throughout my college journey were memoirs and short stories. Before this course, I hadn’t thought too deeply about how meaningful this genre can be, most especially to young readers.

We read great novels like Darius the Great is Not Okay (which I will colloquially call “Darius”), and not-so-great ones like The Inheritance Games. Books like Darius offer young readers a perspective on what mental health can look and feel like without explicit scenes of ideation that can influence a reader to make rash decisions. Darius also shows the reality of a tween boy going through diagnosed depression, where we see his moments of weakness mixed with mental health issues. Other issues come out when his family in Iran discovers that he is medicated, causing them to criticize how his mental health is handled.  

Darius shows the complications that come with depression at a young age, furthering the exposure of mental health concepts to young readers who might relate and wish to seek help. Yet, we also see other novels in the same genre, such as The Inheritance Games, as previously mentioned.  

When we read The Inheritance Games in YA Lit, I saw a lot of criticism in the room as my classmates and I discussed it. Of course, some of it was from me—I thought that many of the concepts in the book were very easy to grasp, and certain storylines didn’t hold up well by the end of the book. But I honestly didn’t hate it. I just don’t think that I, a twenty-one-year-old, was the target audience.

Those who believe that sappy love triangle novels like this one have no place in “literature”, but I would argue that it has a very special place. It’s what many tweens read as they develop and move away from things like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Dork Diaries. While these series are amazing, their targets are for more juvenile audiences (I read them in elementary school).  

It’s canonical that there be a somewhat awkward shift in what a kid finds interesting reading-wise. The Inheritance Games series is full of cliches that someone my age would easily catch and potentially devalue, but many young readers have never been exposed to the cliche of “teenage girl gains the inheritance of a dead billionaire and that dead billionaire’s handsome grandsons all have a crush on her”. For them, it’s new and exciting.  

Even if the series has audience members that could be deemed “too old” for it, I still believe that whatever gets people to read holds value. In an America that has all-time-low literacy rates, literature that can capture an audience long enough to finally read a book after not experiencing the joys of fictional worlds their whole life is valuable. I am a part of the generation where schools stopped attempting to challenge children and adolescents to simply get them out of the door and graduate. Reading is fundamental to human development, and I will never shame those who love young adult literature, the most flexible genre to exist.