No Shame in it.

Je viens de lire un billet sur le blog de Cynthia Jaynes Omololu, auteur d'un premier roman, Dirty Little Secrets, dans lequel elle se demande pourquoi certains adultes ont honte d'avouer avoir aimé son livre. Elle revient alors sur sa propre adolescence, dans les années 80, où elle avait le choix de lire Judy Blume ou Virginia C. Andrews, avant de piocher directement dans la case "romans adultes".

Aujourd'hui le choix est plus vaste ! Les ados ont incroyablement de chance. Mais pas seulement.

Today's YA books are honest, brutal, funny, fast-paced and romantic. We don't spend three pages talking about the wind whispering through the trees. We don't have time. Our readers want to jump into a story, have it envelop them and live through the characters until they close the last page. Books like TWILIGHT and THE LOVELY BONES have given many adults their first taste of YA writing, and I'm hearing that many of them want more.

(...)

While I adore my teen audience, I hope that many adults read DLS too. I think there is just as much in the story for them as there is for teens. That's what my readers are telling me, albeit in hushed tones. The next time you're in a bookstore, wander over to the Teen or Young Adult section. Take a look at the beautiful covers and read some of the flaps. Steady yourself, because you'll probably be surprised at how many of them you want to read.

C'est un sujet qui a été beaucoup abordé ces derniers jours dans les blogs des auteurs américains. Pourquoi, comment... la littérature "jeunesse".

Maggie Stiefvater a ajouté son couplet.

Sa réflexion vient de remarques lues au cours d'un débat sur un autre blog, où un intervenant faisait la remarque que la production actuelle était pauvre, de qualité médiocre, comparée à The Secret Garden ou Ann of Green Gables.

I have two things to say to that.

1) Stop being nostalgic, it's ruining your camera lens.

2) Yes, those books are great. They are also classics, which means that they are the select few which have survived the test of time. Shockingly, there are countless other novels published at the same time as these classics that you have never heard of. Why? Because they were not timeless beauties. Are we really comparing every YA novel published today against the Audrey Hepburns of the children's book world?

3) Not every book has to be a classic. I read thousands of books as a teen. Some of them were classics. Some of them weren't. This may be shocking, but I enjoyed them all about the same.

It irritates me when readers talk smack about commercial books that were never meant to be high literature. Some books can be just entertainment, very much rooted in the mores of the era, and the integrity of literature as we know it will not go down like the Titanic.

My other argument I hear as a YA author is that YA is inferior to adult literature.

YA is vapid, trendy, excellent, profound, worse than adult fiction, better than adult fiction, short, long, magical, contemporary, etc. Because YA has no rules. We have the great and the mundane right next to each other. And like I said, not everything has to be great.

YA literature shouldn't be dumbed down. Teens are perfectly capable of grasping nuance and subtlety and context -- they are baby yous, after all, aren't they, and what were you reading when you were 12?

And finally, I get a lot of reader mail from apologetic older readers who confess that they enjoyed SHIVER despite being "long out of their teens." They clearly feel guilty about this. To this, I say:

I never felt guilty, as a teen, reading about adults. I also never felt guilty reading Watership Down, despite not being a rabbit.

--) L'occasion de vous suggérer le billet sur le blog Citrouille : Ecrire pour l'enfance, pour la jeunesse, pour la vieillesse pourquoi comment etc.... (Itw de Olivier Adam et Luc Blanvillain sur France inter - vidéo)  Lien permanent

Si j'évoque tout ceci, c'est parce que, quelque part, cela rejoint mes propres arguments, à force d'entendre, pourquoi tu fais ci, et pourquoi tu lis ça, et pourquoi tu ne fais plus ci, et pourquoi ça devient comme ça ... 

Je pourrais exposer les 1001 raisons qui font que ... mais là, pas de temps, pas envie, nous verrons plus tard.

Comments

[mle jteferaidire]

ahlala... Judy Blume... Toute ma jeunesse et de grands souvenirs de lecture !! :D

[Mlle Pointillés]

Je suis tellement d'accord avec cet avis du Times!! C'est tout à fait ça! (c'est ce que je pense en 1000 fois mieux écrit...!)

@ Sandy: je me marre encore au sujet de tes aventures....

Sur ce, je m'en vais finir ma lecture des aventures de l'Epouvanteur...;)
A bientôt!

[C(larabel).]

> J'aime beaucoup ce passage dans l'article du Times,

"YA authors are able to take themselves less seriously. They're able to have a little more fun, and they're less confined by this idea of themselves as Very Important Artists. That paradoxically leads them to create far better work than people who are trying to win awards."

According to Skurnick, who also reviews adult fiction for publications including The Times, YA books are "more vibrant" than many adult titles, "with better plots, better characterizations, a more complete creation of a world."

C'est tellement vrai !!! Et c'est ce qui me pousse à m'intéresser à ce secteur, à m'y sentir bien, à l'aise. De ne plus vouloir en bouger. J'en ai lu des romans sérieux, des romans qui se prenaient trop au sérieux aussi. Maintenant, j'ai besoin de passer à autre chose. Je butine ailleurs, où tout est plus excitant ! :)

[Elizabeth-Bennet]

Franchement, je ne me pose pas la question, je lis un livre et j'aime ou j'aime pas, voilà tout. Le snobisme littéraire est quelque chose qui m'a toujours profondément - excusez le terme - gonflée.

Le plus drôle avec moi, c'est qu'étant ado, je ne lisais absolument pas de livres pour ados !!! J'étais plutôt classiques anglophones, Austen, les soeurs Brontë...Je ne lisais pas de chick lit' (il est vrai que le genre commençait tout juste à apparaître - je vais sur mes 28 ans) et pas de YA non plus, puisque je ne savais même pas ce que c'était !!!

Mais depuis que j'ai découvert le genre YA, j'adore et je n'ai pas honte d'en lire, ni même de dire que j'en lis, malgré les moqueries que j'essuie régulièrement au sujet de ma passion pour la saga Twilight. Mais rien à faire de ce que pense les autres ! Après tout, je lis pour moi :)

[C(larabel).]

By Susan Carpenter

It used to be that the only adults who read young adult literature were those who had a vested interest -- teachers or librarians or parents who either needed or wanted to keep an eye on developing readers' tastes.

But increasingly, adults are reading YA books with no ulterior motives. Attracted by well-written, fast-paced and engaging stories that span the gamut of genres and subjects, such readers have mainstreamed a niche long derided as just for kids.

Thanks to huge crossover hits like Stephenie Meyer's bloodsucking "Twilight" saga, Suzanne Collins' fight-to-the-death "The Hunger Games" trilogy, Rick Riordan's "The Lightning Thief" and Markus Zusak's Nazi-era "The Book Thief," YA is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak publishing market. Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children's/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.

"Even as the recession has dipped publishing in general, young adult has held strong," said David Levithan, editorial director and vice president of Scholastic, publisher of "The Hunger Games," as well as of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, the series largely credited with jump-starting this juggernaut of a trend.

"You go on the subway and see 40-year-old stockbrokers reading 'Twilight,' " said Levithan, himself a YA author. "That wouldn't have happened five years ago."

Levithan added that passing "the mother test" is an indication that a title could go wide. "If a lot of us on staff are sending a book to our mothers because it's really engaging literature, that's a good sign."

Books that have passed the Scholastic mother test? Judy Blundell's "What I Saw and How I Lied," which won a 2008 National Book Award, and the wolf love story "Shiver" by Maggie Stiefvater.

According to Kris Vreeland, children's department manager for Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, "You have a lot of different people coming to young adult in a lot of different ways."

Often, word of mouth will bring a teen title to an adult's attention, Vreeland said. Such was the case with the "Twilight" series, which has sold more than 85 million copies worldwide since the first book was published in 2005.

Other times, it's an award. When Sherman Alexie's young adult debut, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," won the National Book Award in 2007, it lent credibility to the entire genre.

"One strong writer leads to exploring that area more, so you've got several now who are leading people into all kinds of directions," Vreeland noted. "You can go the whole gamut: sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction, romance, realistic fiction, humor. There's a lot of good stuff going on."

Add the growing number of movies made from kids' books, such as "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" and "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief," as well as all the successful adult authors -- James Patterson, Carl Hiaasen, Francine Prose and Terry Pratchett -- now writing for younger readers, and you've got a phenomenon "that extends beyond the gatekeepers who want to know what their kids are getting into," Vreeland said.

Christel Joy Johnson is one. The 36-year-old actress doesn't have children, but she's an avid reader of young adult science fiction.

"There's something really wonderful about taking the journey with someone of that age. One of the main reasons I'm attracted to YA literature is just the openness of the characters," said Johnson, who recently finished the necromancer tale "Sabriel," by Garth Nix.

"I think part of the reason we're seeing adults reading YA is that often there's no bones made about the fact that a YA book is explicitly intended to entertain," said Lizzie Skurnick, 36, author of "Shelf Discovery," a collection of essays about young adult literature from the 1960s and 1970s.

"YA authors are able to take themselves less seriously. They're able to have a little more fun, and they're less confined by this idea of themselves as Very Important Artists. That paradoxically leads them to create far better work than people who are trying to win awards."

According to Skurnick, who also reviews adult fiction for publications including The Times, YA books are "more vibrant" than many adult titles, "with better plots, better characterizations, a more complete creation of a world."

And often, those worlds are steeped in the imagination. In Patterson's "Maximum Ride" series, a 14-year-old girl leads a pack of laboratory-bred, winged teens on various adventures. In "I Am the Messenger," Zusak writes about a teenage cab driver who becomes an inadvertent hero, prompted by anonymous messages that lead him to specific addresses at specific times.

Many of today's young adult authors were born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s, when YA began to move beyond the staid, emotionless tales of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys in favor of more adventurous work from Judy Blume, Madeleine L'Engle and Robert Cormier. Now, they're turning out their own modern masterpieces.

"There's some amazing, vibrant, fantastic literature in the YA venue," said Cecil Castellucci, a young adult author who recently started the Pardon My Youth book club at Skylight Books in Los Feliz to "help people understand that YA literature is not just for young adults."

According to Castellucci, author of "Boy Proof," "Beige" and other titles about misfit teenage girls, we're living in the golden age of young adult literature.

"As a YA author, I get tired of being asked, 'When are you going to write a real book?' " she said. "As if a YA book is not a real book."

Ask any of the genre's growing legion of fans: It is.

susan.carpenter@latimes .com