"Darkness Too Visible" or "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood"?

I had to laugh at my assertion on our discussion board this week that children’s literature is full of “wonder, imagination, and earnestness” after reading Meghan Cox Gurdon’s article “Darkness Too Visible.” I must have romanticized the field of children’s/YA lit based on some particular favorites from my own childhood. Cox Gurdon asserts her impression that YA books are growing more violent. She worries that reading these books as entertainment will “not merely gratify taste, after all but create it,” and worse, might normalize the behaviors or situations portrayed. I'm not sure I agree, though I'd be interested in what research tells us on the subject. I just read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a disturbing and beautiful (not YA) novel. It didn’t make me feel like engaging in violence or drug use. It did make the world seem more complex, wider than my experience.

Sherman Alexie rebuffs Cox Gurdon in “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood,” showing that her and others’ criticism of YA lit is misplaced: “They are trying to protect privileged children. Or the seemingly privileged.” Why not cry out against racism or poverty instead, the actual causes for these horrors?

Alexie notes that even Alcott’s Little Women portrays “domestic terrors.” Has anyone seen Greta Gerwig’s recent film adaptation? I love it! It’s definitely about the structural oppression of women in that historical context, a terror Alexie might suggest Cox Gurdon judge as harshly as the downfall of YA lit. I think stories seen as light often also explore systemic hardship, if not in explicit instances. Alexie posits that teens (and others!) read because “books—especially the dark and dangerous ones—will save them.” 

Alexie ends with an assertion about why he writes: Not to protect, but to help readers through, showing them how to “fight their monsters.” That’s where I land: I don’t think a story should avoid the real hardships young people face if those books are also somehow helping them through. 

Unrelatedly, I was interested in the note Cox Gurdon made about S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders more or less creating the YA lit genre, or the idea of the genre, in 1967. That’s relatively new as a category for literature. Near the end of her article, she gestures toward a demise for the genre. Do young adults read “adult” books more often than YA lit? What makes something a young adult book? What hole does YA lit fill between picture books and fiction or nonfiction marketed to adults?