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.

No Shame in it.

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