thoughts on M.T. Anderson and Nicola Yoon's new YA books, In New York Journal of Books

My thoughts on two new YA books—M. T Anderson's Symphony for the City of the Dead and Nicola Yoon's Everything, Everything—in the New York Journal of Books.

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on history sanitized and simplified for younger readers: let's think about this

In today's New York Times, Alexander Alter writes of the increasing number of "adult" authors who are reconfiguring their history books for the younger, still-book-buying crowd (or for those who buy books for them). She writes:

Inspired by the booming market for young adult novels, a growing number of biographers and historians are retrofitting their works to make them palatable for younger readers. Prominent nonfiction writers like Ms. Hillenbrand, Jon Meacham and Rick Atkinson are now grappling with how to handle unsettling or controversial material in their books as they try to win over this impressionable new audience.

And these slimmed-down, simplified and sometimes sanitized editions of popular nonfiction titles are fast becoming a vibrant, growing and lucrative niche.

I wonder about the wisdom of this—about the felt need to take well-written and absorbing histories and make them less than (for sanitized and simplified sound like less than to me) for younger readers. Let's first acknowledge what many young readers are capable of, which is to say, books rich with moral dilemma and emboldened by ideas. Let's next acknowledge what young readers need, which is to say the facts of then and now. 

You can already get that sort of thing in novels written for younger readers. Certainly Patricia McCormick is not writing down, making it easy, simplifying when she writes about the sex trade or the Cambodian war. Certainly Ruta Sepetys didn't make Siberia comfortable in Between Shades of Gray. Certainly M. T. Anderson didn't set out to make Octavian Nothing easy, simple, sterile. Certainly, Marilyn Nelson, publishing Carver, a life in verse for young adults, didn't think to herself, let me make this easy. She wrote each page smart, each page full of innuendo and terms to look up and mysteries, like this:

A Charmed Life

Here breathes a solitary pilgrim sustained by dew

and the kindness of strangers. An astonished Midas

surrounded by the exponentially multiplying miracles: my

Yucca and Cactus in the Chicago World Exposition;

friends of the spirit; teachers. Ah, the bleak horizons of joy.

Light every morning dawns through the trees. Surely

this is worth more than one life.

And certainly I, writing novels for young adults, am not setting history down in burnished, skip-over-it slices. Not when I write about the Spanish Civil War (Small Damages) or the shadowy blockade of the Berlin Wall (Going Over) or Centennial Philadelphia (Dangerous Neighbors) or 1871 Philadelphia (Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent) or Florence during the 1966 flood (One Thing Stolen). I am working to put a younger reader into the heart of it all. And sometimes that's not pretty. Sometimes that hurts. But that is history for you.

That's life.

YA writers have been writing sophisticated historical novels for a long time now. Why, then, suggest that those same YA readers need to be written down to when it comes to pure nonfiction? To the big stories. The telling moments. The individual against the state, the home versus the political, the science versus the dream, the big stuff that shapes who we became. Nonfiction for young adults, like novels for young adults, should be alive and deep and somehow true. It should respect the capabilities of younger readers.

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On writerly risk taking: M.T. Anderson and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto talk

I stole upstairs with Clockhouse in hand and read the conversation between my friend Rahna and the ever-interesting M.T. Anderson (Octavian Nothing, Feed, etc.). It's the sort of interview the whole world should read—two very smart people talking, unexpected tangents and revelations, deep questions, unvarnished (which is to say actively honest) responses.

I share just a snippet here, but oh my. The whole is New York Times quality stuff.

RRR: What is the biggest risk you ever took as a person and as a writer?

MTA: Every big work is a risk. One thing I found is easy enough to tell my students, but now I am having to tell myself is: every time you write a new book, you should try to write something that is impossible for you. You should try to write something at which you think you are going to fail. Because it's only then that you actually realize that you've succeeded in new ways you've never dreamed of before. Now that obviously a nice adage to tell students when they are facing trouble, to say, look, you just need to lean into this, and trust that you can do it and seek solutions because if you don't feel like it's impossible for you then you aren't re-envisioning yourself as much as you need to be. On the other hand, it's very difficult to do that for yourself....

The photo above is of too long ago—my husband, my son, Reiko's Ming and her boys, then Reiko herself at Hawk Mountain. Reiko sees things others don't. This interview (and her books) are proof of that.

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The Longest Distance (short story excerpt)

Even when you don’t ask you have asked by the way you look at me—by how you try to hold my eye, try to suggest (a touching gesture) that it is concern you feel, not curiosity. But if I had answers don’t you think that I’d confess them? That I’d have said by now, put out a proclamation, that Joelle died for this, or for that. That she died because. All I can tell you is what you know, which is: Joelle is gone. She’s the slash of black you see just after lightning breaks the sky. She’s the place where a cliff stops being stone and becomes the air that you could fall through.

From "The Longest Distance," a short story soon forthcoming in No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen collection also featuring An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, and Jacqueline Woodson. And who had the idea for the anthology in the first place? Why, Miss Jill Santopolo, of course.

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