No Such Thing as Children's Books

There’s a category of fiction meant for YA (young adult). The age band is 13 to 17 years (too old to be called children; but not yet adults). Increasingly, plenty of adults (not just YA’s) like YA fiction. So much so that Ruth Graham laments:

“The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels with pride.”

Plenty of such readers admit that they like the “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia” of YA fiction. So what is Graham’s grouse?

“YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.”

And she also dislikes the simplistic endings: it’s all “weeping or cheering”. But she acknowledges that she may well be in the minority and likely to be dismissed as “snobbish and joyless and old”.

CS Lewis has a different perspective on writing for children. He says you can’t write for children, if that’s what you set out to do! Why?

“There is no question of 'children' conceived as a strange species whose habits you have 'made up' like an anthropologist or a commercial traveller. Nor, I suspect, would it be possible, thus face to face, to regale the child with things calculated to please it but regarded by yourself with indifference or contempt.”

Besides, he says, adults can’t remember childhood anyway:

“Sentimentality is so apt to creep in if we write at length about children as seen by their elders.”

He is also dismissive of the likes of Graham:

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.”

Why can’t you grow up to like both kids’ and adult’s books?

“The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth...But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?”

And isn’t what he says next so very true:

“It is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in…I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did.”

To those who rail against escapism in fiction, J R R Tolkien had the perfect response:

“The only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.”