Lost Boys/Lost Girls: Coming of Age in YA Fiction

When I was in college I rarely had time to read for pleasure, so if a contemporary novel made its way onto my radar and into my hands, you can bet there was a huge cultural buzz around it.

Now that I think of it, the only two novels I read back then that weren't required school reading were by Bret Easton Ellis: Less than Zero and the follow-up, The Rules of Attraction. These books were not termed young adult--the young adult pickins' were slim in the 80's--but I think they both would be classified that way now.

Ellis wasn't much past his teen years when they were published.

Both novels sort of blend together in my mind, but from what I remember, they feature college age kids floundering around with friendships and sexual relationships (including some questioning of sexuality), experimentation with alcohol and drugs, and rebellion against parents and societal expectations. Also, there's a very cool present tense, stream of consciousness narration that I had never seen before.

My early 20-something self thought these books were brilliant and truthful, hilarious and heartbreaking. And I totally bought into Ellis' cynical, subversive vision of 1980's America.  It was like the guy was speaking to me and my friends, waking us up to how things really were. And weirdly, instead of feeling depressed about it, we felt a gleeful defiance.

I'm not saying that Ellis explicitly was calling anyone to action or trying to be the voice of his generation, etc. (or maybe he was. Who knows?) And I haven't read the books in years, so this is all filtering through a haze of memories, but my takeaway feeling after reading the books was that this messed up world I was about to inherit didn't have to be that way. I could do things differently. I could change things, reject the numb, boring, cruddy, ridiculous lives of my parents' generation and do it all better. I am Generation X, damn it!

(I say this with a bemused, weary sigh, which I suspect means that I am way beyond YA and firmly in MA--Middle Age. ha ha.)

Here's something funny about coming of age books: they scare the crap out of adults, one of the reasons you'll see articles lamenting the "darkness" in YA literature. We old fogies who've forgotten what it feels like to BE A TEEN don't want our kids to read about scary stuff that happens in our world.

We don't want them to even know about it.

But I think kids need these books, books they can carry around with them and pass on to each other, books that speak to their lost, floundery, scared, angry selves.

The classics in the Coming of Age genre are books like Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and A Separate Peace. I read Of Human Bondage recently, and let me just say: Whoa. Talk about dark. Talk about exploring the depraved tendencies that lurk in the human soul. Talk about books we should keep out of impressionable teen hands.

That book, published in 1915, features (SPOILER) a main character who rejects the uptight Christianity of his childhood and tries on other lifestyles for size before settling on a new way of thinking that would likely make his dead parents roll over in their graves.

I suspect the book was banned big time.

Some others good Coming of Age books of past generations off the top of my head:

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar 
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Secret History by Donna Tartt  (fun fact: Donna Tartt went to school with Bret Easton Ellis)

Since I am not a teen, I can't say which novels published today are likely to resonate with teens, but a few I've read recently might strike a chord:

Everything John Green has written. Latest: The Fault in Our Stars. (But my fave, still, is the first novel I read of his, An Abundance of Katherines.)
Story of a Girl, Sara Zarr
Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher
How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff. Also, an undiscovered masterpiece in my opinion: What I Was
All You Never Wanted, Adele Griffin
Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos
The Beginning of Everything, Robin Schneider
Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley

and the one I finished just the other day...
September Girls by Bennett Madison

Like the very best of coming of age books, it's got a lost kid at its center. Sam is a depressed, cynical mess trying to make sense of his life. His mom's taken off before the start of the book, apparently on a quest to find herself. Sam says she ran away to a place called Women's Land (which I thought was a metaphor, but turns out it is an actual place. I'm picturing a feminist commune where weary moms don't have to clean up dishes or launder their sons' smelly socks. Sad fact: I sorta related to the mom here.)

Sam's dad is lost too, and as a way of grappling with the loss of his wife, he takes Sam and his older brother, Jeff, a stereotypical Animal-House-style frat boy, to the beach, to that mysterious realm known as "The Outer Banks in North Carolina." And this is where the magical realism of the story kicks in.

There are beautiful girls EVERYWHERE, sexy blonds literally throwing themselves at Sam (and not, strangely, at Jeff.) So this is all new and interesting for Sam, who's pretty inexperienced when it comes to women, and honestly, a little freaked out by the attention.

I'm not giving out spoilers except to say the Girls are not what they seem. Which is not to say that the girls are "bad."

The brilliance of this book lies in the way it makes us question our assumptions of gender roles--how girls and boy are expected to act and to relate to each other in a society that flings so many mixed messages at them.

Look for it on the Printz Award list this year.

Also, on the list of books that concerned, outraged parents will want to ban.

 

Changing the Course of Your Life. (A Review of Gayle Forman's Just One Day)

Sometimes a book just clicks with you. The voice of the writer draws you in. You get the characters. You laugh and cry and cringe along with them. The entire world view of the author aligns with yours. I LOVE books like this. The bummer is that it's a rare experience to find one. The writer part of me usually doesn't let it happen. I analyze the experience as I'm going through it. Why'd she start with a prologue? What made the main character say that when the author just told us he was a different kind of person? It's annoying, to put it mildly. Still, as a reader I'm always hoping for that love whenever I flip back the first page of a new book.

So it just happened and now I want to shout out my joy. The book is Gayle Forman's Just One Day (pub date: Jan., 2013). I love Gayle Forman. Her two previous books If I Stay and Where She Went are among my favorites. She's edited by the amazing Julie Strauss-Gable at Dutton. Side note: Julie Strauss-Gable is my dream editor. If you're looking for good, absorbing books for your teens (or for you) start with any book on her list. (And what a list it is. John Green. Ally Condie. Stephanie Perkins. Nova Ren Suma. These people are the stars of YA literature.) 

Let me start with a brief summary. I don't want to give too much away and one criticism I have of the book is that the blurb on the back reveals a little too much. On the surface it's a love story. Obedient, sweet, good girl Allyson is on one of those see every country in Europe in a few weeks kind of trip and she's not having a good time. Her best friend from forever is bugging her. The endless touristy sites are boring. She's off to college in the fall and she just wants to get on with it. Then--she meets Willem, a handsome Dutch actor whose tooling around in England with a rogue Shakespeare company. The two spend an amazing day together that basically changes the course of Allyson's life. I'm not saying anything more about the plot.

Here's the thing about plot: there's only so many plots when you come down to it. Girl meets boy/girl loses boy is one. Then you have your character takes a journey story line. And your character experiences a death plot. I was talking about this the other day with a friend--telling her about a great book I read (shout out to Jennifer Castle here) The Beginning of After about a girl who loses her family in a car accident. I said to my friend: it's sort of a cliche' how many car accidents there are in teen books. Then I laughed. Because MY YA book starts off with a car accident.

So what is it about car accidents? Well, I think it's just a dramatic way to get your story going, push your character into a dark place she's got to figure out how to crawl out of. What's really going on in these books is the character is discovering who he or she really is. It's the classic Coming of Age theme. Death tends to make you think about that kind of thing. Also, Love.

Back to Just One Day. Willem is the catalyst for Allyson's journey--meeting him forces her to question the sleepy obedient good girl way she's been living her life and wonder if there's another path. There's lots of traveling in this book, both actual traveling (that will make YOU want to travel, I promise) and metaphorical traveling--a true mental and emotional journey for this girl, who could be every girl on the cusp of becoming a woman--a person.

Which means learning what you want to do with your own life, what you love and what you hate (is this best friend truly your best friend? Do you really want to study Chemistry? How do you want to cut your freaking hair?) and discovering that you might have more control over these decisions than you realized. Because we are talking teens here, there's an interesting and kind of heartbreaking subplot about throwing off parental expectations too. I've written about this before--how often in YA books you have either non-existent parents or neglectful/abusive ones. It's disturbing. But the vehicle is a symbolic way to highlight this necessary growth process. If you ever want to be the hero in your own life, inevitably, you've got to shuck off the parents and strike out on your own. I love how Gayle Forman handles Allyson's helicoptery parents. They are the antagonists (particularly the mom) but they are not villains. They're complex, flawed, well-meaning people. (Or maybe this was just  MY reading, because I've got helicoptery mom tendencies in me!)

All of the characters in this book are complex and real. The best friend who keeps changing her hair style and clothes so that Allyson hardly knows what the girl will look like each time she sees her. The new best friend, a cool African American guy who's brilliant and funny and wise to the ways people wear different masks depending on who they're dealing with. And of course, the GUY. Mysterious and beautiful Willem--the boy every girl yearns for--the one who gets our jokes and says we're pretty and who when he touches us makes us feel an electric current running straight to our hearts.

Who cares about the boy though? 

Here's the great thing about this book. It's Allyson's story. It's potentially every girl's story. Could something that happens on just one day change the entire course of a person's life?

Why not?

Buy this book for your daughters, people. And then you read it too.