Greetings, everyone. I hope you're still enjoying my column. As you may or may not have guessed, I have a list of "things that irritate me," which I reference each time I write. The topics are generally pretty set-in-stone, but any suggestions for future columns are definitely welcome. Just send me an email!
With that aside, I'd like to delve into this week's subject: Young Adult (YA) novels. I must confess that I was quite the YA fiction fan when I was in middle school. Those were the glory days when Harry Potter books reigned supreme. These days, though, YA just keeps getting progressively worse. Sure, it wasn't well written when I was in middle school, but there were far fewer badly written books to choose from than there are now. YA, to me, is a phase that we all go through and that we all, consequently, grow out of.
I never got into the whole "Twilight" franchise, nor do I ever intend to. I pride myself on the fact that my eyes have never read one line of that series. My prejudice against badly written, badly formatted YA novels perhaps stems from the fact that I am an English major; however, you do not have to be an English major to recognize bad writing when you see it. And with YA, it practically jumps out of the book and smacks you in the face. On the other hand, badly written YA novels encourage me to write. If these books are getting published, I will have no trouble putting a book of my own on the shelves a few years down the road.
Before anyone emails to harangue me, I will bring myself to admit that not all YA novels are horribly written, nor do all series start out with mangled plotlines. The biggest problem with YA today is that it is horribly overproduced. Let's just say an aspiring YA author gets his or her book about vampire-wizards published. The first book is well written, easy to follow and surprisingly interesting. A big publishing company buys the rights to this author's book — with a catch. He/she has to make this book into a series, and must produce a book every eight months for the next five years. For those of you unfamiliar with writing long works, that is not a lot of time. It leads to improper revisions, flat plotlines and bad characterization. Now our aspiring author doesn't have the time to crank out another masterpiece like his/her first novel, and each year the books decline in quality. The disaster is exacerbated when we consider the sheer number of people choosing to write YA novels these days as a way to make fast cash. Yes, there is a lot of money in the franchise, especially if a big producer chooses to make your book into a movie. However, writing with a movie deal as an ultimate goal makes for sloppy books. A movie is not the same thing as a novel, as is evident in the disappointing quality of modern book-to-film adaptations.
Perhaps the most important reason why I vehemently dislike YA is that I'm a fan of modernism and classics. On the rare occasion that I try and give a YA novel a chance, I barely get a quarter of the way through it before I have to wholeheartedly fight the urge to burn the thing. Leave me my Joyce, Woolf and Proust for my beach reading and I'll be the happiest person alive. However, I am human and must admit that every now and then, I do enjoy a good tabloid magazine.
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KaceyRayder is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Kacey.Rayder@tufts.edu.
