There was a time children’s books were pious and goody two shoes. They were almost incredibly boring.
I read so many books in which the characters were goody-goody that I was primed and ready for Tom Bailey By Thomas Bailey Aldrich because it was “Story of a bad boy.” I also loved Tom Sawyer because, within the limitations of my being a girl I identified with him.
In retrospect I love the Countess of Segur’s fairytales, a very girly amusement, with all the dress and glitter stuff. I will never learn to love her other books, though, the ones in which good little girls never do any evil. They come across as rather insipid and bland.
And of course, that’s what we see a reaction to in most books nowadays. You know the books my kids got assigned in school, where every character is a disabled pagan Hispanic lesbian who is mistreated by everyone, until she heroically gets so beat up she wins (you only think I’m joking.)
We had a panel about this at the last con here in town, and all the other people – all older than I, btw, by at least ten and usually closer to 20 years – twittered incessantly about how books now were more “inclusive” and how children should know about children who do drugs, have promiscuous sex, cut themselves and commit suicide.
Uh. Okay. They know about them. I mean, seriously, my kids went to urban schools. They were the odd ones, with their two parent family, their clean house, the parents who both worked (even when I wasn’t getting paid) and who extended a very small income quite far. They knew kids who got raped, kids who did drugs, kids who cut themselves.
From friends who live in the suburbs, their kids knew these kids too, though they might not have been in the majority.
The thing I must ask here is: what is the purpose of those books?
The answer from the panel was “to make the outcasts feel included.”
Okay, then, that is even a laudable principle, although as Dave Freer pointed out on Monday, it is not in fact the principal purpose of books. Books are a product in the entertainment category, NOT in fact a social agency. However, given that the schools have a captive audience, and that the books CAN give comfort to the outcasts then there should be MAYBE some books available which speak to kids in horrible situations. Books that say “you are not alone.”
But if that is the intent, they are doing it wrong. First of all, it shouldn’t be EVERY BOOK. Why not? Because the majority of kids might come from what was quaintly called once “a broken home” or have some other minor issue, but unless you are in an urban and dysfunctional area, the majority of them won’t be Abused Minority Of The Day With Interesting Dysfunction, Who Gets Beat Up And Often Raped Throughout The Entire Book. And because even to the kids in these situations, these books say “being a victim is sanctified. You don’t need to do anything. And you should only aspire to being a victim forever.”
Oh, these books are also mired circa the 50s, and not even the real fifties, but the imaginary fifties, where every minority and anyone different was marginalized everywhere. I hate to tell this to the people writing these earnest books, but these days, in our schools, being a minority of color or belief or even illness is to be treated with kid gloves and allowed license for pretty much everything. True story, when my kid was being given DETENTION for not having a pencil with him – because he’d come late from a school field trip and not been allowed to swing by his locker for a pencil – I went in to protest, and found a whole classroom being held hostage by minority-child-with-bipolar-disorder who was holding knife and standing in front of door, and not allowing people to escape.
The teachers were pretty please, nicely, trying to talk him down, but when I asked if he was going to get detention or expelled, I got treated like I was evil and told “He has problems. At home.”
Which is all well and good, but of course, letting him run wild at school won’t fix his problems at home, and won’t give him a pathway out – besides disrupting the education of all the other children and teaching them that if you tan an interesting color you can do anything.
I was told this is actually a legalistic thing. You see, the schools have to show x number of “rehabilitated offenders” – this means the teachers don’t go after REAL offenders. They’re hard to rehabilitate and don’t comply with detentions/therapy. They go after middle school kids who will complete the program. Meanwhile they’re too scared of the real offenders (they have knives! And besides, they must have horrible lives at home, or they wouldn’t do this, right?) to say “boo” to them and they run rampant.
Into this throw the “would be therapeutic” tell-them-they’re-not-alone books.
The real offenders don’t read them. (Most of them don’t read. Fact.) But the kids from decent backgrounds do. What do they take away? That if you’re a victim you have to be respected – even if you attack others. That people who behave very badly must have backgrounds like those you read in books. That this is the only explanation for people acting badly.
Look, prescriptive books never worked very well on people like me. I looked at the goody two shoes girls in books and wondered how one could dip a fictional character in ink.
Because that’s how I treated goody two shoes girls in school.
BUT they worked at least on a majority of people. Characters who were upright, did good, etc, if not overdone, worked. Kids internalized them as “these are the good guys.”
And some kids are internalizing the current dysfunctional model. When coupled with what the real bad guys get away with in school, you have a generation where up is down and bad and dysfunctional is cool and being a victim is sainted.
Am I advocating a return to goody two shoes books? Not, but heck there were always other books. I loved Enid Blyton where the kids had more than a bit of the old Adam, but still tried to be honorable and decent. Same for Heinlein’s juveniles.
And that is what we need more of.
Look, we’re leaving an impossible mess to our kids. The last thing we need is to leave them the idea that being a victim or a rebel without a clue is good.
I’m not advocating prescriptive books. I guess I’m advocating Human Wave books – YA in which the human spirit triumphs, and where the hope for the future is more than an endless psychodrama of victimhood and anger.
Mad Genius Club 
39 responses to “Lest Darkness Falls”
[…] UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club. […]
It neither makes your point nor detracts from it, but Saki’s The Storyteller feels somehow relevant.
[…] also read Mad Genius Club, wherein Sarah Hoyt talked about YA novels and the need for some hope in them, and more characters […]
I grew up on the Heinlein Juveniles (and any other SF I could lay my hands on) as well as on superhero comic books. The protagonists in the Heinlein books seem pretty “Goody Two Shoes” to me, (It took Clifford Russel to the very _end_ of the book before he finally threw a drink in Ace Quiggle’s face?)
And these comic books were 60’s and 70’s vintage, height of the “silver age.” Superman was the “big boy scout.” Batman had yet to be redefined by Miller in his “Dark Knight Returns”. And Wolverine and Lobo hadn’t made nominally “good guy” psychos in costume seem “cool” and “edgy.” Oh, there was the Punisher, I suppose, but he wasn’t a regular character and was usually set as a contrast to the title character of whatever book in which he was guesting.
Then everything went to felgercarb. I gafiated from comics sometime about ’87 and it was really mostly inertia that had kept me going that long. (Dammit, these characters were friends and I didn’t want to abandon them. But eventually, it reached the point where I couldn’t take it any more.) I’ve sampled them from time to time since and have had no real inclination to continue. They just don’t appeal. Oh, I can pick up older comics and, some hold up well, some don’t, but by and large I can still enjoy them, not like most of the recent . . . stuff.
And for “young adult” fiction? I stuck it through “The Hunger Games” and finished the book but felt no inclination to pick up the next one. This is what’s popular these days? (And, yes, I was on a panel on “young adult fiction” where one of the panelists was a teen and, supposedly, this was what all the kids at school–hyperbole, I’m sure–were reading and gushing about.)
But I have hope. Harry Potter was a blast and the main characters are actually decent people. And the movies were fun too. Not perfect, but overall decent people. Rick Riordan’s books, the ones I’ve read, are wonderful. And the first two movies were fun too, fun enough that I’m hoping they continue.
More directly relevant is this paragraph from Jo Walton’s review of Robert A. Heinlein’s Time For the Stars over at Tor.com:
And I just had a horrible thought: a re-write of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn done as a parody of contemporary YA
porn“literature” would probably be acclaimed as a “brilliant deconstruction” or some such.I read the sequel to Rebecca (not YA, granted) written by “a Lady” who made Maxim into a wife abuser, not the tortured soul he was. Jo Walton is right, and I WOULDN’T read it.
“I’d read it but I probably wouldn’t keep coming back to it.”
“I’d read it” for me, is a very low bar. But yea, “wouldn’t keep coming back to it.” (Although the biggest “keep coming back to it” book for me, bar none, remains “Have Space Suit Will Travel”.)
And I keep forgetting to check the “notify” box.
And that’s one of just a couple of Heinleins that I haven’t read.
Philistine! Get thee hence to a library or bookstore (brick and mortar or online)!
In a more serious vein, I do consider that novel to be the best thing he ever wrote, bar none.
YMMV, but that’s my mileage.
Gah. Just got in, and read that as “In a more mysterious van,” and thought “Scooby?” *chuckle* The old brain, it goes a-wandering sometimes.
Heinlein is a pretty good bet, in any case. Not all of his stuff is my favorite, but they all meet the minimum for “pretty good stuff, definitely worth a read” and frequently exceed that by far.
On vacation last weekend, a friend and I saw the Mystery Machine on the highway in Wyoming or Montana, and we started making Scooby sounds. Who on Earth paints their van up like that? Its another sign that the collapse is coming, I’m sure.
Rather likely, yes.
Now, Mr. We’re waiting. (Grins.)
…and then there’s what they would do to Roald Dahl.
There’s plenty of the non-horrifying YA out there. Maybe some of it’s older, and it’s definitely not being pushed at kids today by Our Wonderful Gatekeepers in either education or publishing, but it’s out there.
Alternately, we
couldshould write our own.And now I remind myself (again) that i need to go through the reading list for my daughter’s Language Arts class. (Which I guess is what we’re calling English nowadays.)
Yes. And be prepared to be horrified.
I’m oddly looking forward to it. To my daughter’s horror. I see it as an opportunity for inoculation against greater travesties later on.
The always-awesome Larry Correia has a theory on why children dislike reading.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/correia-on-the-classics/
Basically, they’re being forced to read boring works, so then they associate most reading with boredom:
You want to get kids in high school to like reading? Don’t force them to read the same old tired crap. It isn’t educational just because it was written by a sexually-frustrated Victorian woman. Let them read other things. Let them read modern books. Let them read from different genres. Give them a giant list to chose from. News flash, not everybody likes the same thing. I know that is incredibly difficult for academics to swallow, but it is true.
Is the purpose of a education to teach you to think, or is it to check a box saying you read X number of approved books? If the purpose is to check a box, then congrats most teachers. You win. Sure, these kids grow up and hate reading for the rest of their lives, but whatever. You checked that box real good.
Read the whole thing.
I wrote a YA (well, more “middle reader”–aimed at something like grades 3-8) about “a girl and her dolphin living in undersea colonies” close to 20 years ago. For various reasons it has sat by the wayside and really needs some rewriting now (I like to think my writing has matured since then).
One more task to add to the list, I think.
That said, my daughter, Grade 4, loves my “The Hordes of Chanakra” (for which I am currently awaiting response from a publisher that has “pulled it from slush for a closer look”) novel, which was not written with a “younger audience” in mind, and has twice asked me to re-read it in installments as a bedtime story. (Leads me to think that I might actually have a good story there.)
In other things, she is currently reading the last of the Harry Potter books (having finished the earlier volumes). I’m reading Erik Flint’s “1632” aloud in installments as her current bedtime story (I may disagree with Mr. Flint’s politics but he can tell a good story). So there is good stuff for the kids to read if we look around.
My own daughter enjoyed Monster Hunter International when she read it last year. Except, she said, there was “too much talk about guns.”
Heck, I’ve read The Hobbit, LOTR, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and some others as bedtime stories.
My father reading me LOTR as a bedtime story is one of my most treasured childhood memories, hearing his voice rumbling in his chest as I leaned against him.
Robert got read Ray Bradbury. By request. Sigh. That boy is irretrievably warped.
I really should try some other Bradbury. I’ve tried to read Fahrenheit 451 at least 6 times, and never been able to finish it. But I haven’t tried anything else of his.
I want to write YA mysteries set during the American revolution! TIME (is not on my side.)
Here’s a title for you: “The Hessian In The Window Seat”
As someone who survived serious abuse as a child, I resent the hell out of this cult of victimization. According to the popular media, someone with a background like mine should be either a helpless ward of the state or (more likely, since I am a Caucasian male) a monster.
I chose not to be either. What was done to me left its marks, and there are some ways in which I’ll never be “normal”. However, I have the same moral choice as anyone else. My early life is something that shaped the direction that my life has taken, but who I am today is who I chose to become. Not a parasite, not a victim, not a monster, but a man who takes responsibility for his actions and pays his own way.
That is part of what I have done in my own fiction. My protagonist was altered into something not quite human by his parents at an early age, but he chose how to make his way through life with that burden. I use a fantasy mechanism as an metaphor for dissociation because I think that it makes the story more accessible, but I use the fantastic to show that what matters is not what was done to us, but what we do.
I use the fantastic to show that what matters is not what was done to us, but what we do.
That’s very inspiring. I like it.
You’re right, education is *not* the main focus of the YA section. Those others are what we call “textbooks,” and only some Odds and Odders read them for pleasure. Not that I, personally, know any such ones. *hides Asimov’s Understanding Physics behind a stack of comics*
That said, there’s an element in YA that can’t escape it- the lickspittle left has at least grasped that, however imperfectly. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family of natural storytellers. I was *told* stories from before I was born. Brothers Grimm- the *old* ones, with real wickedness and very little saccharine sap, Jack Tales, Brer Rabbit, and more. I was fortunate, I know, to have a childhood closer to Tom Sawyer than not. *grin*
For those not so lucky, who have the interest or are merely forced to read in order to pass, it’s worth remembering that children learn from *everything.* You’re absolutely right that stories such as these, that depict explicit sex and violence and glorifying the victim, are teaching the wrong lesson. At least I hope to all that is good and right in the world that this is a bug, not a feature.
We’ve gone from soporific goody-two-shoes to “she’s been so victimized, she must be good!” That may be a hint about how those teachers couldn’t bring themselves to confront a knife wielding child as they ought. Perhaps they read such stories, too, and internalized the victim-as-hero idea so much that they couldn’t see the truth. Bad behavior is exactly what it sounds like. It shouldn’t be rewarded.
Given that young people learn from everything, it stands to reason that they should have good role models. Where’s the good role model in the knife-wielding child scenario? Inclusivity is all well and good, but do you want to include general population in the county jail? I should hope not! Adults, at least, should know better. The responsibility ultimately rests on the parents, not the authors, to fix this. Oh, the teachers have a hand in it, and they have a responsibility, too (mom’s a teacher, so I’ve had Opinions of Weight on that forever).
But while that child is still a child, at the very least, the parents are the most important guide they have in life. I think there are going to be some highly unpleasant consequences for the parents of my generation, when they grow old, should the collapse not fall upon them soon. I may have a long fuse, but one sure thing that will get me very angry is child abuse. To neglect a child so as to subject them to the sort of things mentioned here *without setting them straight* is a form of abuse. Sometimes they can’t avoid it, but the parents should always have a chance to tell them “No, that’s not how the real world works.”
Fortunately, my godson doesn’t know how to read yet (thought that is fast a-changin’ *grin*). His godfather has been telling him stories since he was born, too. I think he’ll turn out alright, despite what the world may try to do to him. He’s already expressed an interest in sc-fi. If he doesn’t give me a heart attack once he starts dating, I’ll probably be satisfied. *grin*
The most unhealthy part of the abuse-porn YA books is the fixation on the act of damage (cutting, rape, whatever), as others have said. It does reinforce “this is OK or at least common”. I could see a *helpful* YA book where the viewpoint character is not the one being abused, but who sees the signs and realizes something is very wrong. Maybe with ways to help, and why some ways that might *seem* like help really aren’t. Same-age friends would be more likely to notice warning signs of suicidal thought than parents, and be more in a position to persuade a friend to seek help. Or notice a constant array of bruises the friend refuses to talk about.
On the other side, the didactic morality tales only please the writer and the stuffy relatives who buy them for children who don’t deserve such drivel. The Saki story with the “good little girl” getting eaten by wolves always makes me smile…
I have to ask. You dipped girls in ink?
Only their hair. I was a BAD girl.
A long time ago I wrote an editorial about this kind of thing, and one takeaway that nobody here has touched is that the average kid, who does NOT identify with the disabled pagan Hispanic lesbian who is mistreated by everyone might pick up an entirely unintended lesson. That it is the disabled pagan Hispanic lesbian who is mistreated by everyone is the one whom one should pick on, if one wants to be considered one of the popular kids (And what kid doesn’t?), and it even gives them ideas of HOW to harass the victim, and tells them they will get away with it.
That’s one reason I write the type of YAs I’ve written (ELFY will be split, and I’m going over the last of the changes now…will be out in 2014, but I’m pushing for late April/early May due to that being when the action takes place in the book). I don’t like to see people as victims. I see them as heroes who can overcome, and even though my hero is an orphan who’s been mistrained and doesn’t think he can do hardly anything at the beginning of the book, he proves himself wrong, and in so doing, wins the true love of his life and a new life, all unlooked for, in an entirely different place.
I’m not about to write that this young man, who’s been traumatized by the loss of his parents and other things, is OK because he’s a victim. He’s OK because he can get past all that and do what needs to be done anyway. He does it with magic, he’s not human, but who cares? The moral is still the same — do what you can do today. Learn whatever you can. (Bruno the Elfy is very big on learning things.) Don’t worry about being something you’re not; be who _you_ are.
That’s why I’ve believed in my book for the past ten years and pushed until a prescient publisher (Twilight Times Books) picked it up. Because I think that people are tired of reading about folks who are so angst-ridden, they can’t have any fun at all . . . really, what’s the point of that?
I know that first sentence is very odd. Let’s try that again (in the sense of “writer, heal thyself,” or suchlike) . . . the reason I wrote ELFY in the first place is that I’m very, very tired of dark, angst-ridden stories. I wanted to see a humorous take on that trope. I didn’t see it. So I wrote it myself.
[…] wanted to discuss but didn’t have the working brain cells to do so. Sarah followed up with a great post the next day and Dave’s post yesterday is another one to read on the topic. So I’m not […]